Smart Core System for Dependable Many-Core Processor with Multifunction Routers

摘要

Dependability of many-core processors is a very important topic. To improve the dependability, we propose the Smart Core system, which is a smart many-core system with redundant cores and multifunction routers. The multifunction router has three functions: copying packets, changing the destinations of packets, and rendezvousing and comparing two packets from different nodes. Using these additional functions, the Smart Core system realizes redundant execution on multiple cores and detects execution errors at the packet level. We implemented a many-core processor with the Smart Core system on a software simulator. The evalution result shows that the performance overhead of packet rendezvous is small, up to 4.1%. In addition, we verified that a dependable many-core processor with the Smart Core system detects execution errors on a hardware prototyping system.