research-article

Zombie memory: Extending memory lifetime by reviving dead blocks

Authors:

Rodolfo Azevedo,

Parikshit Gopalan,

Sergey YekhaninAuthors Info & Claims

ISCA '13: Proceedings of the 40th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture

Pages 452 - 463

https://doi.org/10.1145/2485922.2485961

Published: 23 June 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Zombie is an endurance management framework that enables a variety of error correction mechanisms to extend the lifetimes of memories that suffer from bit failures caused by wearout, such as phase-change memory (PCM). Zombie supports both single-level cell (SLC) and multi-level cell (MLC) variants. It extends the lifetime of blocks in working memory pages (primary blocks) by pairing them with spare blocks, i.e., working blocks in pages that have been disabled due to exhaustion of a single block's error correction resources, which would be 'dead' otherwise. Spare blocks adaptively provide error correction resources to primary blocks as failures accumulate over time. This reduces the waste caused by early block failures, making working blocks in discarded pages a useful resource. Even though we use PCM as the target technology, Zombie applies to any memory technology that suffers stuck-at cell failures.

This paper describes the Zombie framework, a combination of two new error correction mechanisms (ZombieXOR for SLC and ZombieMLC for MLC) and the extension of two previously proposed SLC mechanisms (ZombieECP and ZombieERC). The result is a 58% to 92% improvement in endurance for Zombie SLC memory and an even more impressive 11x to 17x improvement for ZombieMLC, both with performance overheads of only 0.1% when memories using prior error correction mechanisms reach end of life.

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Desai MRumale AAsadinia MBogle S(2024)WIRE: Write Energy Reduction via Encoding in Phase Change Main Memories (PCM)Proceedings of the Future Technologies Conference (FTC) 2024, Volume 310.1007/978-3-031-73125-9_38(599-615)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
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Urquijo GVoelckers KMeyer ABellinger CAsadinia M(2023)SW-PCM: Graceful Degradation Support in PCM Main Memories by Using Swaption MechanismProceedings of the Future Technologies Conference (FTC) 2023, Volume 310.1007/978-3-031-47457-6_34(514-531)Online publication date: 9-Nov-2023
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Index Terms

Zombie memory: Extending memory lifetime by reviving dead blocks
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software development techniques
      1. Error handling and recovery

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cover image ACM Other conferences

ISCA '13: Proceedings of the 40th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture

June 2013

686 pages

ISBN:9781450320795

DOI:10.1145/2485922

General Chair:
Avi Mendelson
Technion

ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News Volume 41, Issue 3
ICSA '13
June 2013
666 pages
ISSN:0163-5964
DOI:10.1145/2508148
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2013 ACM.

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Published: 23 June 2013

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June 23 - 27, 2013

Tel-Aviv, Israel

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ISCA '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 56 of 288 submissions, 19%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 543 of 3,203 submissions, 17%

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https://doi.org/10.1109/CCWC62904.2025.10903957
Desai MRumale AAsadinia MBogle S(2024)WIRE: Write Energy Reduction via Encoding in Phase Change Main Memories (PCM)Proceedings of the Future Technologies Conference (FTC) 2024, Volume 310.1007/978-3-031-73125-9_38(599-615)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-73125-9_38
Urquijo GVoelckers KMeyer ABellinger CAsadinia M(2023)SW-PCM: Graceful Degradation Support in PCM Main Memories by Using Swaption MechanismProceedings of the Future Technologies Conference (FTC) 2023, Volume 310.1007/978-3-031-47457-6_34(514-531)Online publication date: 9-Nov-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47457-6_34
Mahar SLiu SSeemakhupt KYoung VKhan S(2021)Write Prediction for Persistent Memory SystemsProceedings of the 30th International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques10.1109/PACT52795.2021.00025(242-257)Online publication date: 26-Sep-2021
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Liu CKotra JJung MKandemir M(2020)CentaurProceedings of the ACM on Measurement and Analysis of Computing Systems10.1145/33921464:2(1-25)Online publication date: 12-Jun-2020
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Yavits LOrosa LMahar SFerreira JErez MGinosar RMutlu O(2020)WoLFRaM: Enhancing Wear-Leveling and Fault Tolerance in Resistive Memories using Programmable Address Decoders2020 IEEE 38th International Conference on Computer Design (ICCD)10.1109/ICCD50377.2020.00044(187-196)Online publication date: Oct-2020
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Rangarajan NPatnaik SKnechtel JSinanoglu ORakheja S(2020)SMART: A Secure Magnetoelectric AntifeRromagnet-Based Tamper-Proof Non-Volatile MemoryIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2020.29888898(76130-76142)Online publication date: 2020
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Liu XRoberts DAusavarungnirun RMutlu OZhao J(2019)Binary StarProceedings of the 52nd Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture10.1145/3352460.3358262(807-820)Online publication date: 12-Oct-2019
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Rashidi SJalili MSarbazi-Azad H(2019)A Survey on PCM Lifetime Enhancement SchemesACM Computing Surveys10.1145/333225752:4(1-38)Online publication date: 30-Aug-2019
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