Exploring Dynamic Redundancy to Resuscitate Faulty PCM Blocks
- 1 May 2014
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in ACM Journal on Emerging Technologies in Computing Systems
- Vol. 10 (4), 1-23
- https://doi.org/10.1145/2602156
Abstract
DRAM technology challenges have increased the necessity to adapt to the emerging memory technologies like Phase-Change Memory (PCM or PRAM). While such emerging technologies provide benefits like storage density, nonvolatility, and low energy consumption, they are constrained by limited write endurance that becomes more pronounced with process variation. In this article, we explore a novel PRAM-based main memory system which resuscitates a group of faulty pages in a cost-effective manner to significantly extend the PCM main memory lifetime while minimizing the performance impact. In particular, we explore three different dimensions of dynamic redundancy levels and group sizes, and design low-cost hardware and software support for our proposed schemes. We aim to have minimal hardware modifications (that have less than 1% on-chip and off-chip area overheads). Also, our schemes can improve the PRAM lifetime by up to 105× (times) over a chip with no error correction capabilities, and outperform prior schemes such as DRM and ECP at a small fraction of the hardware cost. The performance overhead resulting from our scheme is less than 8% on average across 21 applications from SPEC2006, Splash-2, and PARSEC benchmark suites.Keywords
Funding Information
- Division of Computing and Communication Foundations
- Office of Cyberinfrastructure
This publication has 28 references indexed in Scilit:
- RDIS: A recursively defined invertible set scheme to tolerate multiple stuck-at faults in resistive memoryPublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2012
- Energy-aware writes to non-volatile main memoryACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, 2012
- Pay-As-You-GoPublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,2011
- Flip-N-WritePublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,2009
- Phase-change random access memory: A scalable technologyIBM Journal of Research and Development, 2008
- RAIF: Redundant Array of Independent FilesystemsPublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2007
- The HP AutoRAID hierarchical storage systemACM Transactions on Computer Systems, 1996
- The SPLASH-2 programsPublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,1995
- A case for redundant arrays of inexpensive disks (RAID)ACM SIGMOD Record, 1988
- Space/time trade-offs in hash coding with allowable errorsCommunications of the ACM, 1970