Leveraging Transactional Memory for Energy-efficient Computing below Safe Operation Margins
Adrián Cristal, Osman Ünsal, Gülay Yalçın, Christof W. Fetzer, Jons-Tobias Wamhoff, Pascal A. Felber, Derin Harmanci, Anita Sobe · 2013
The power envelope has become a major issue for the design of computer systems. One way of reducing energy consumption is to downscale the voltage of microprocessors. However, this does not come without costs. By decreasing the voltage, the likelihood of failures increases drastically and without mechanisms for reliability, the systems would not operate anymore. For reliability we need (1) error detection and (2) error recovery mechanisms. We provide in this paper a first study investigating the combination of different error detection mechanisms with transactional memory, with the objective to improve energy efficiency. We notably introduce an analytical model that allows us to give recommendations for future work. 1.