Dynamic Reliability Management for FPGA-Based Systems
Radiation tolerance in FPGAs is an important field of research particularly for reliable computation in electronics used in aerospace and satellite missions. The motivation behind this research is the degradation of reliability in FPGA hardware due to single-event effects caused by radiation particl...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Wiley
2020-01-01
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| Series: | International Journal of Reconfigurable Computing |
| Online Access: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2020/2808710 |
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| author | Jahanzeb Anwer Sebastian Meisner Marco Platzner |
| author_facet | Jahanzeb Anwer Sebastian Meisner Marco Platzner |
| author_sort | Jahanzeb Anwer |
| collection | DOAJ |
| description | Radiation tolerance in FPGAs is an important field of research particularly for reliable computation in electronics used in aerospace and satellite missions. The motivation behind this research is the degradation of reliability in FPGA hardware due to single-event effects caused by radiation particles. Redundancy is a commonly used technique to enhance the fault-tolerance capability of radiation-sensitive applications. However, redundancy comes with an overhead in terms of excessive area consumption, latency, and power dissipation. Moreover, the redundant circuit implementations vary in structure and resource usage with the redundancy insertion algorithms as well as number of used redundant stages. The radiation environment varies during the operation time span of the mission depending on the orbit and space weather conditions. Therefore, the overheads due to redundancy should also be optimized at run-time with respect to the current radiation level. In this paper, we propose a technique called Dynamic Reliability Management (DRM) that utilizes the radiation data, interprets it, selects a suitable redundancy level, and performs the run-time reconfiguration, thus varying the reliability levels of the target computation modules. DRM is composed of two parts. The design-time tool flow of DRM generates a library of various redundant implementations of the circuit with different magnitudes of performance factors. The run-time tool flow, while utilizing the radiation/error-rate data, selects a required redundancy level and reconfigures the computation module with the corresponding redundant implementation. Both parts of DRM have been verified by experimentation on various benchmarks. The most significant finding we have from this experimentation is that the performance can be scaled multiple times by using partial reconfiguration feature of DRM, e.g., 7.7 and 3.7 times better performance results obtained for our data sorter and matrix multiplier case studies compared with static reliability management techniques. Therefore, DRM allows for maintaining a suitable trade-off between computation reliability and performance overhead during run-time of an application. |
| format | Article |
| id | doaj-art-6997e61a543145c3932af85d3ff2f504 |
| institution | Kabale University |
| issn | 1687-7195 1687-7209 |
| language | English |
| publishDate | 2020-01-01 |
| publisher | Wiley |
| record_format | Article |
| series | International Journal of Reconfigurable Computing |
| spelling | doaj-art-6997e61a543145c3932af85d3ff2f5042025-02-03T01:04:08ZengWileyInternational Journal of Reconfigurable Computing1687-71951687-72092020-01-01202010.1155/2020/28087102808710Dynamic Reliability Management for FPGA-Based SystemsJahanzeb Anwer0Sebastian Meisner1Marco Platzner2Department of Computer Science, Paderborn University, 33098 Paderborn, GermanyDepartment of Computer Science, Paderborn University, 33098 Paderborn, GermanyDepartment of Computer Science, Paderborn University, 33098 Paderborn, GermanyRadiation tolerance in FPGAs is an important field of research particularly for reliable computation in electronics used in aerospace and satellite missions. The motivation behind this research is the degradation of reliability in FPGA hardware due to single-event effects caused by radiation particles. Redundancy is a commonly used technique to enhance the fault-tolerance capability of radiation-sensitive applications. However, redundancy comes with an overhead in terms of excessive area consumption, latency, and power dissipation. Moreover, the redundant circuit implementations vary in structure and resource usage with the redundancy insertion algorithms as well as number of used redundant stages. The radiation environment varies during the operation time span of the mission depending on the orbit and space weather conditions. Therefore, the overheads due to redundancy should also be optimized at run-time with respect to the current radiation level. In this paper, we propose a technique called Dynamic Reliability Management (DRM) that utilizes the radiation data, interprets it, selects a suitable redundancy level, and performs the run-time reconfiguration, thus varying the reliability levels of the target computation modules. DRM is composed of two parts. The design-time tool flow of DRM generates a library of various redundant implementations of the circuit with different magnitudes of performance factors. The run-time tool flow, while utilizing the radiation/error-rate data, selects a required redundancy level and reconfigures the computation module with the corresponding redundant implementation. Both parts of DRM have been verified by experimentation on various benchmarks. The most significant finding we have from this experimentation is that the performance can be scaled multiple times by using partial reconfiguration feature of DRM, e.g., 7.7 and 3.7 times better performance results obtained for our data sorter and matrix multiplier case studies compared with static reliability management techniques. Therefore, DRM allows for maintaining a suitable trade-off between computation reliability and performance overhead during run-time of an application.http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2020/2808710 |
| spellingShingle | Jahanzeb Anwer Sebastian Meisner Marco Platzner Dynamic Reliability Management for FPGA-Based Systems International Journal of Reconfigurable Computing |
| title | Dynamic Reliability Management for FPGA-Based Systems |
| title_full | Dynamic Reliability Management for FPGA-Based Systems |
| title_fullStr | Dynamic Reliability Management for FPGA-Based Systems |
| title_full_unstemmed | Dynamic Reliability Management for FPGA-Based Systems |
| title_short | Dynamic Reliability Management for FPGA-Based Systems |
| title_sort | dynamic reliability management for fpga based systems |
| url | http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2020/2808710 |
| work_keys_str_mv | AT jahanzebanwer dynamicreliabilitymanagementforfpgabasedsystems AT sebastianmeisner dynamicreliabilitymanagementforfpgabasedsystems AT marcoplatzner dynamicreliabilitymanagementforfpgabasedsystems |