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CPPC: correctable parity protected cache

Published: 04 June 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Due to shrinking feature sizes processors are becoming more vulnerable to soft errors. Write-back caches are particularly vulnerable since they hold dirty data that do not exist in other memory levels. While conventional error correcting codes can protect write-back caches, it has been shown that they are expensive in terms of area and power. This paper proposes a reliable write-back cache called Correctable Parity Protected Cache (CPPC) which adds error correction capability to a parity-protected cache. For this purpose, CPPC augments a write-back parity-protected cache with two registers: the first register stores the XOR of all data written to the cache and the second register stores the XOR of all dirty data that are removed from the cache. CPPC relies on parity to detect a fault and then on the two XOR registers to correct faults. By a novel combination of byte shifting and parity interleaving CPPC corrects both single and spatial multi-bit faults to provide a high degree of reliability. We compare CPPC with one-dimensional parity, SECDED (Single Error Correction Double Error Detection) and two-dimensional parity-protected caches. Our experimental results show that CPPC provides a high level of reliability while its overheads are less than the overheads of SECDED and two-dimensional parity.

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  • (2022)MLFTCache: Multilevel Fault Tolerance Scheme for Write-Back L2 Cache Under IrradiationIEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science10.1109/TNS.2022.315180569:5(1182-1192)Online publication date: May-2022
  • (2022)A Real-Time Error Detection (RTD) Architecture and Its Use for Reliability and Post-Silicon Validation for F/F Based Memory ArraysIEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing10.1109/TETC.2022.314148610:2(524-536)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2022
  • (2021)Characterizing System-Level Masking Effects against Soft ErrorsElectronics10.3390/electronics1018228610:18(2286)Online publication date: 17-Sep-2021
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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
ISCA '11: Proceedings of the 38th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
June 2011
488 pages
ISBN:9781450304726
DOI:10.1145/2000064
  • cover image ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News
    ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News  Volume 39, Issue 3
    ISCA '11
    June 2011
    462 pages
    ISSN:0163-5964
    DOI:10.1145/2024723
    Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 04 June 2011

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Author Tags

  1. cache
  2. parity
  3. reliability

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Cited By

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  • (2022)MLFTCache: Multilevel Fault Tolerance Scheme for Write-Back L2 Cache Under IrradiationIEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science10.1109/TNS.2022.315180569:5(1182-1192)Online publication date: May-2022
  • (2022)A Real-Time Error Detection (RTD) Architecture and Its Use for Reliability and Post-Silicon Validation for F/F Based Memory ArraysIEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing10.1109/TETC.2022.314148610:2(524-536)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2022
  • (2021)Characterizing System-Level Masking Effects against Soft ErrorsElectronics10.3390/electronics1018228610:18(2286)Online publication date: 17-Sep-2021
  • (2021)LPC: An Error Correction Code for Mitigating Faults in 3D MemoriesIEEE Transactions on Computers10.1109/TC.2020.303440070:11(2001-2012)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2021
  • (2021)Fault-tolerant architecture for Cache : Summaries, Assessments and TrendsJournal of Physics: Conference Series10.1088/1742-6596/2113/1/0120682113:1(012068)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2021
  • (2020)ECC-United Cache: Maximizing Efficiency of Error Detection/Correction Codes in Associative Cache MemoriesIEEE Transactions on Computers10.1109/TC.2020.2994067(1-1)Online publication date: 2020
  • (2019)TA-LRWIEEE Transactions on Computers10.1109/TC.2018.287543968:3(455-470)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2019
  • (2019)Killi: Runtime Fault Classification to Deploy Low Voltage Caches without MBIST2019 IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA)10.1109/HPCA.2019.00046(304-316)Online publication date: Feb-2019
  • (2018)Leverage Redundancy in Hardware Transactional Memory to Improve Cache ReliabilityProceedings of the 47th International Conference on Parallel Processing10.1145/3225058.3225093(1-10)Online publication date: 13-Aug-2018
  • (2018)Character ActorProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/31614071:4(1-23)Online publication date: 8-Jan-2018
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