Date of Award:

2013

Document Type:

Thesis

Degree Name:

Master of Science (MS)

Department:

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Advisor/Chair:

Koushik Chakraborty

Abstract

Recent increases in hard fault rates in modern chip multi-processors have led to a variety of approaches to try and save manufacturing yield. Among these are: fine-grain fault tolerance (such as error correction coding, redundant cache lines, and redundant functional units), and large-grain fault tolerance (such as disabling of faulty cores, adding extra cores, and core salvaging techniques). This paper considers the case of core salvaging techniques and the heterogeneous per- formance introduced when these techniques have some salvaged and some non-faulty cores. It proposes a hypervisor-based hardware thread scheduler, triggered by detection of spin locks and thread imbalance, that mitigates the loss of throughput resulting from this het- erogeneity. Specifically, a new algorithm, called Most ProgressMade algorithm, reduces the number of synchronization locks held on a salvaged core and balances the time each thread in an application spends running on that core. For some benchmarks, the results show as much as a 2.68x increase in performance over a salvaged chip multi-processor without this technique.

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