Combining Error Detection and Transactional Memory for Energy-Efficient Computing below Safe Operation Margins

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 any more. 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. According to our evaluation, using reliability schemes combined with transactional memory for error recovery reduces energy by 54% while providing a reliability level of 100%.