research-article

Feng shui of supercomputer memory: positional effects in DRAM and SRAM faults

Authors:

Vilas Sridharan,

Nathan DeBardeleben,

Sean Blanchard,

Sudhanva GurumurthiAuthors Info & Claims

SC '13: Proceedings of the International Conference on High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis

Article No.: 22, Pages 1 - 11

https://doi.org/10.1145/2503210.2503257

Published: 17 November 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Several recent publications confirm that faults are common in high-performance computing systems. Therefore, further attention to the faults experienced by such computing systems is warranted. In this paper, we present a study of DRAM and SRAM faults in large high-performance computing systems. Our goal is to understand the factors that influence faults in production settings.

We examine the impact of aging on DRAM, finding a marked shift from permanent to transient faults in the first two years of DRAM lifetime. We examine the impact of DRAM vendor, finding that fault rates vary by more than 4x among vendors. We examine the physical location of faults in a DRAM device and in a data center; contrary to prior studies, we find no correlations with either. Finally, we study the impact of altitude and rack placement on SRAM faults, finding that, as expected, altitude has a substantial impact on SRAM faults, and that top of rack placement correlates with 20% higher fault rate.

References

[1]

Flux calculator. http://seutest.com/cgi-bin/FluxCalculator.cgi.

[2]

AMD64 architecture programmer's manual revision 3.17, 2011.

[3]

A. Avizienis, J.-C. Laprie, B. Randell, and C. Landwehr. Basic concepts and taxonomy of dependable and secure computing. Dependable and Secure Computing, IEEE Transactions on, 1(1):11--33, 2004.

Digital Library

[4]

R. Baumann. Soft errors in commercial semiconductor technology: Overview and scaling trends. In IEEE Reliability Physics Tutorial Notes, 2002.

[5]

R. Baumann. Soft errors in advanced computer systems. Design Test of Computers, IEEE, 22(3):258--266, 2005.

Digital Library

[6]

K. Bergman, S. Borkar, D. Campbell, W. Carlson, W. Dally, M. Denneau, P. Franzon, W. Harrod, J. Hiller, S. Karp, S. Keckler, D. Klein, R. Lucas, M. Richards, A. Scarpelli, S. Scott, A. Snavely, T. Sterling, R. S. Williams, and K. Yelick. Exascale computing study: Technology challenges in achieving exascale systems, Peter Kogge, editor & study lead, 2008.

[7]

L. Borucki, G. Schindlbeck, and C. Slayman. Comparison of accelerated DRAM soft error rates measured at component and system level. In Reliability Physics Symposium, 2008. IRPS 2008. IEEE International, pages 482--487, 2008.

[8]

A. Chugg, A. Burnell, P. Duncan, S. Parker, and J. Ward. The random telegraph signal behavior of intermittently stuck bits in sdrams. Nuclear Science, IEEE Transactions on, 56(6):3057--3064, 2009.

[9]

C. Constantinescu. Impact of deep submicron technology on dependability of vlsi circuits. In Dependable Systems and Networks, 2002. DSN 2002. Proceedings. International Conference on, pages 205--209, 2002.

Digital Library

[10]

C. Constantinescu. Trends and challenges in vlsi circuit reliability. Micro, IEEE, 23(4):14--19, 2003.

Digital Library

[11]

A. Dixit, R. Heald, and A. Wood. Trends from ten years of soft error experimentation. In Silicon Errors in Logic - System Effects (SELSE), 2009 IEEE Workshop on, 2009.

[12]

N. El-Sayed, I. A. Stefanovici, G. Amvrosiadis, A. A. Hwang, and B. Schroeder. Temperature management in data centers: why some (might) like it hot. In Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGMETRICS/PERFORMANCE joint international conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems, SIGMETRICS '12, pages 163--174, New York, NY, USA, 2012. ACM.

Digital Library

[13]

M. Gadlage, J. Ahlbin, B. Narasimham, V. Ramachandran, C. Dinkins, B. Bhuva, R. Schrimpf, and R. Shuler. The effect of elevated temperature on digital single event transient pulse widths in a bulk cmos technology. In Reliability Physics Symposium, 2009 IEEE International, pages 170--173, 2009.

[14]

A. A. Hwang, I. A. Stefanovici, and B. Schroeder. Cosmic rays don't strike twice: understanding the nature of dram errors and the implications for system design. In Proceedings of the 17th international conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, ASPLOS XVII, pages 111--122, New York, NY, USA, 2012. ACM.

Digital Library

[15]

X. Li, M. C. Huang, K. Shen, and L. Chu. A realistic evaluation of memory hardware errors and software system susceptibility. In Proceedings of the 2010 USENIX conference on USENIX annual technical conference, USENIXATC'10, pages 6--20, Berkeley, Calif., USA, 2010. USENIX Association.

Digital Library

[16]

X. Li, K. Shen, M. C. Huang, and L. Chu. A memory soft error measurement on production systems. In 2007 USENIX Annual Technical Conference on Proceedings of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference, ATC'07, pages 21:1--21:6, Berkeley, Calif., USA, 2007. USENIX Association.

Digital Library

[17]

T. May and M. H. Woods. Alpha-particle-induced soft errors in dynamic memories. Electron Devices, IEEE Transactions on, 26(1):2--9, 1979.

[18]

A. Messer, P. Bernadat, G. Fu, D. Chen, Z. Dimitrijevic, D. Lie, D. Mannaru, A. Riska, and D. Milojicic. Susceptibility of commodity systems and software to memory soft errors. Computers, IEEE Transactions on, 53(12):1557--1568, 2004.

Digital Library

[19]

H. Quinn, P. Graham, and T. Fairbanks. Sees induced by high-energy protons and neutrons in sdram. In Radiation Effects Data Workshop (REDW), 2011 IEEE, pages 1--5, 2011.

[20]

B. Schroeder and G. Gibson. A large-scale study of failures in high-performance computing systems. In Dependable Systems and Networks, 2006. DSN 2006. International Conference on, pages 249--258, 2006.

Digital Library

[21]

B. Schroeder, E. Pinheiro, and W.-D. Weber. DRAM errors in the wild: a large-scale field study. Commun. ACM, 54(2):100--107, Feb. 2011.

Digital Library

[22]

T. Siddiqua, A. Papathanasiou, A. Biswas, and S. Gurumurthi. Analysis of memory errors from large-scale field data collection. In Silicon Errors in Logic - System Effects (SELSE), 2013 IEEE Workshop on, 2013.

[23]

V. Sridharan and D. Liberty. A study of DRAM failures in the field. In Proceedings of the International Conference on High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, SC '12, pages 76:1--76:11, Los Alamitos, Calif., USA, 2012. IEEE Computer Society Press.

Digital Library

[24]

M. Walt and H. H. Barschall. Angular distributions of elastically scattered 1-mev neutrons. Phys. Rev., 90:714--715, May 1953.

[25]

W. Zhang and T. Li. Microarchitecture soft error vulnerability characterization and mitigation under 3d integration technology. In Proceedings of the 41st annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture, MICRO 41, pages 435--446, Washington, D.C., USA, 2008. IEEE Computer Society.

Digital Library

[26]

J. Ziegler and W. Lanford. The effect of sea level cosmic rays on electronic devices. Journal of Applied Physics, 52(6):4305--4312, 1981.

Cited By

Wu RZhou SLu JShen ZXu ZShu JYang KLin FZhang YBagchi SZhang Y(2024)Removing obstacles before breaking through the memory wallProceedings of the 2024 USENIX Conference on Usenix Annual Technical Conference10.5555/3691992.3692044(851-867)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3691992.3692044
Oles VSchmedding AOstrouchov GShin WSmirni EEngelmann C(2024)Understanding GPU Memory Corruption at Extreme Scale: The Summit Case StudyProceedings of the 38th ACM International Conference on Supercomputing10.1145/3650200.3656615(188-200)Online publication date: 30-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3650200.3656615
Boixaderas IAmaya JMoré SBartolome JVicente DUnsal OGizopoulos DCarpenter PRadojković PAyguadé E(2024)DRAM Errors and Cosmic Rays: Space Invaders or Science Fiction?2024 IEEE 36th International Symposium on Computer Architecture and High Performance Computing (SBAC-PAD)10.1109/SBAC-PAD63648.2024.00025(194-205)Online publication date: 13-Nov-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/SBAC-PAD63648.2024.00025
Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Write-once-memory-code phase change memory
DATE '14: Proceedings of the conference on Design, Automation & Test in Europe

This paper describes a write-once-memory-code phase change memory (WOM-code PCM) architecture for next-generation non-volatile memory applications. Specifically, we address the long latency of the write operation in PCM --- attributed to PCM SET --- by ...
Enabling Hybrid PCM Memory System with Inherent Memory Management
RACS '16: Proceedings of the International Conference on Research in Adaptive and Convergent Systems

Replacing the traditional volatile main memory, e.g., DRAM, with a non-volatile phase change memory (PCM) has become a possible solution to reduce the energy consumption of computing systems. To further reduce the bit cost of PCM, the development trend ...
Redesign the Memory Allocator for Non-Volatile Main Memory
Special Issue on Hardware and Algorithms for Learning On-a-chip and Special Issue on Alternative Computing Systems

The non-volatile memory (NVM) has the merits of byte-addressability, fast speed, persistency and low power consumption, which make it attractive to be used as main memory. Commonly, user process dynamically acquires memory through memory allocators. ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

SC '13: Proceedings of the International Conference on High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis

November 2013

1123 pages

ISBN:9781450323789

DOI:10.1145/2503210

General Chair:
William Gropp
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois
,
Program Chair:
Satoshi Matsuoka
Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan

Copyright © 2013 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 17 November 2013

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

SC13

Sponsor:

SIGHPC
SIGARCH
IEEE-CS

SC13: International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis

November 17 - 21, 2013

Colorado, Denver

Acceptance Rates

SC '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 91 of 449 submissions, 20%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 1,516 of 6,373 submissions, 24%

Upcoming Conference

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

128
Total Citations
View Citations
1,784
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)54
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)4

Reflects downloads up to 08 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Wu RZhou SLu JShen ZXu ZShu JYang KLin FZhang YBagchi SZhang Y(2024)Removing obstacles before breaking through the memory wallProceedings of the 2024 USENIX Conference on Usenix Annual Technical Conference10.5555/3691992.3692044(851-867)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3691992.3692044
Oles VSchmedding AOstrouchov GShin WSmirni EEngelmann C(2024)Understanding GPU Memory Corruption at Extreme Scale: The Summit Case StudyProceedings of the 38th ACM International Conference on Supercomputing10.1145/3650200.3656615(188-200)Online publication date: 30-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3650200.3656615
Boixaderas IAmaya JMoré SBartolome JVicente DUnsal OGizopoulos DCarpenter PRadojković PAyguadé E(2024)DRAM Errors and Cosmic Rays: Space Invaders or Science Fiction?2024 IEEE 36th International Symposium on Computer Architecture and High Performance Computing (SBAC-PAD)10.1109/SBAC-PAD63648.2024.00025(194-205)Online publication date: 13-Nov-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/SBAC-PAD63648.2024.00025
Park SNamkoong HChoi BSullivan MKim J(2024)CacheCraft: Enhancing GPU Performance under Memory Protection through Reconstructed Caching2024 57th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO)10.1109/MICRO61859.2024.00032(324-337)Online publication date: 2-Nov-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/MICRO61859.2024.00032
Deutsch PUlitzsch VGurumurthi SSridharan VEmer JYan M(2024)DelayAVF: Calculating Architectural Vulnerability Factors for Delay Faults2024 57th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO)10.1109/MICRO61859.2024.00026(231-245)Online publication date: 2-Nov-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/MICRO61859.2024.00026
Ko YBurgstaller BGrosser TDubach CSteuwer MXue JOttoni GQuintão Pereira F(2024)BEC: Bit-Level Static Analysis for Reliability against Soft ErrorsProceedings of the 2024 IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization10.1109/CGO57630.2024.10444844(283-295)Online publication date: 2-Mar-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/CGO57630.2024.10444844
Lamster LUnterguggenberger MSchrammel DMangard SCalandrino JTroncoso C(2023)HashTagProceedings of the 32nd USENIX Conference on Security Symposium10.5555/3620237.3620394(2797-2814)Online publication date: 9-Aug-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3620237.3620394
Jung JErez M(2023)Predicting Future-System Reliability with a Component-Level DRAM Fault ModelProceedings of the 56th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture10.1145/3613424.3614294(944-956)Online publication date: 28-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613424.3614294
Liu HLi ZTan CYang RCao GLiu ZGuo CGilad YKostic DMoatti YBiran O(2023)Predicting GPU Failures With High Precision Under Deep Learning WorkloadsProceedings of the 16th ACM International Conference on Systems and Storage10.1145/3579370.3594777(124-135)Online publication date: 5-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3579370.3594777
Dietrich CThomas TMnich M(2023)Checkpoint Placement for Systematic Fault-Injection Campaigns2023 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer Aided Design (ICCAD)10.1109/ICCAD57390.2023.10323809(1-9)Online publication date: 28-Oct-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCAD57390.2023.10323809
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Figures

Tables

Media

View Table of Conten