LEXACT: Low Energy N-Modular Redundancy Using Approximate Computing for Real-Time Multicore Processors

摘要

Multicore processors are becoming popular in safety-critical applications. A series of these applications comprises of kernels where inexact computations may produce results within the boundary of sufficient quality though, for which the reliability should stay at the maximum possible level. Intrinsic core-level redundancy in multicore processors can be leveraged to achieve the desired reliability level in form of N-modular redundancy (NMR). While NMR provides a proactive means of reliability for critical systems, it has two main drawbacks: Increase in the area and energy consumption that are both limiting factors in the embedded systems. This paper presents a software-based method to construct NMR in a multicore processor through k cores using approximate computing concept, where ${ext{k}< ext{N}}$k