Evaluating operating system vulnerability to memory errors

Ferreira, Kurt Brian; Pedretti, Kevin; Brightwell, Ron; Bridges, Patrick G.; Fiala, David; Mueller, Frank

doi:10.1145/2318916.2318930

Cited by 10 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…In this section, we examine similarity in kernel memory. Although the case for resilient operating systems is still emerging (Ferreira et al, 2012), we discuss why these results are promising for our proposed approach.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 91%

“…Effective fault-tolerance strategies in extreme-scale systems may also need to address hardening operating systems against memory failures (Ferreira et al, 2012). If every region of memory is equally likely to experience an uncorrectable error, we would expect to see relatively few errors in kernel memory because it typically occupies a much smaller memory footprint than the application.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A study of the viability of exploiting memory content similarity to improve resilience to memory errors

Levy

Ferreira

Bridges

et al. 2014

The International Journal of High Performance Computing Applica

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Building the next-generation of extreme-scale distributed systems will require overcoming several challenges related to system resilience. As the number of processors in these systems grow, the failure rate increases proportionally. One of the most common sources of failure in large-scale systems is memory. In this paper, we propose a novel runtime for transparently exploiting memory content similarity to improve system resilience by reducing the rate at which memory errors lead to node failure. We evaluate the viability of this approach by examining memory snapshots collected from eight high-performance computing (HPC) applications and two important HPC operating systems. Based on the characteristics of the similarity uncovered, we conclude that our proposed approach shows promise for addressing system resilience in large-scale systems.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 91%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A study of the viability of exploiting memory content similarity to improve resilience to memory errors

Levy

Ferreira

Bridges

et al. 2014

The International Journal of High Performance Computing Applica

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Stay Alive, Don't Give Up: DUE and SDC Reduction with Memory Repair

Kim

Erez

2015

2015 IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing

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Balancing reliability, cost, and performance tradeoffs with FreeFault

Kim

Erez

2015

2015 IEEE 21st International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA)

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Abstract-Memory errors have been a major source of system failures and fault rates may rise even further as memory continues to scale. This increasing fault rate, especially when combined with advent of integrated on-package memories, may exceed the capabilities of traditional fault tolerance mechanisms or significantly increase their overhead. In this paper, we present FreeFault as a hardware-only, transparent, and nearlyfree resilience mechanism that is implemented entirely within a processor and can tolerate the majority of DRAM faults. FreeFault repurposes portions of the last-level cache for storing retired memory regions and augments a hardware memory scrubber to monitor memory health and aid retirement decisions. Because it relies on existing structures (cache associativity) for retirement/remapping type repair, FreeFault has essentially no hardware overhead. Because it requires a very modest portion of the cache (as small as 8KB) to cover a large fraction of DRAM faults, FreeFault has almost no impact on performance. We explain how FreeFault adds an attractive layer in an overall resilience scheme of highly-reliable and highly-available systems by delaying, and even entirely avoiding, calling upon software to make tradeoff decisions between memory capacity, performance, and reliability.

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Evaluating operating system vulnerability to memory errors

Cited by 10 publications

References 30 publications

A study of the viability of exploiting memory content similarity to improve resilience to memory errors

A study of the viability of exploiting memory content similarity to improve resilience to memory errors

Stay Alive, Don't Give Up: DUE and SDC Reduction with Memory Repair

Balancing reliability, cost, and performance tradeoffs with FreeFault

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