CACR Seminar – “Compiler-Aided Soft Error Protection”
Friday, July 24, 2009 2pm
Powell-Booth Room 100
Aviral Shrivastava
Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering,
School of Computing and Informatics, Arizona State University
Unlike design or manufacturing errors, soft errors are much harder to protect against, since they can happen anywhere and anytime. Consequently, soft error protection mechanisms incur extremely high overheads. Most software schemes against soft errors are based on re-execution of programs or parts thereof, to detect and correct soft errors, and therefore have very high performance (avoidable by adding more resources) power (unavoidable) overheads. In contrast, our research tries to achieve protection without explicit re-execution. Fundamentally, our compiler changes the way application uses microarchitectural components, so that it uses the already protected components to process the vulnerable data, and uses the unprotected components to process the protected data. Towards this philosophy goal, we have developed several compiler techniques to better use caches, and register files (RFs), two sites which most critically need protection. While I’ll gloss over our solutions for the cache, I will concentrate on the RF protection problem.
BIO:
Aviral Shrivastava is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, at the Arizona State University, where he has established and heads the Compiler and Microarchitecture Lab (CML). He received his master’s and doctorate in Information and Computer Science from University of California, Irvine. He received his bachelors in Computer Science and Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. His research interests lie at the intersection of compilers and microarchitectures in particular of embedded systems. He studies microarchitecture and compiler techniques for power, performance, temperature, and most recently reliability. Dr. Shrivastava is a lifetime member of ACM, and serves on organizing and program committees of several premier embedded system conferences, including CODES+ISSS, CASES and LCTES.