40 Years of Computing at Newcastle

Department Technical Report Series No. 485

An architecture for tolerating processor failures in shared-memory multiprocessors

M. Banatre
A. Gefflaut
P. Joubert
C. Morin
P.A. Lee

University of Newcastle upon Tyne. 1994

Abstract

This paper focuses on the problem of fault tolerance in shared memory multiprocessors, and describes an architecture designed for transparently tolerating processor failures. The Recoverable Shared Memory (RSM) is the novel component of this architecture, providing a hardware supported backward error recovery mechanism which minimises the propagation of recovery when a processor fails. The RSM permits a shared memory multiprocessor to be constructed using standard caches and cache coherence protocols, and does not require any changes to be made to applications software. A prototype design for the RSM is also described. The performance of the recovery scheme supported by the RSM is evaluated and compared with other schemes that have been proposed for fault tolerant shared memory multiprocessors. The performance study has been conducted by simulation using address traces collected from real parallel applications.