Stay Alive, Don´t Give Up: DUE and SDC Reduction with Memory Repair

Memory faults are the most common fault in current systems. Strong memory error protection techniques prevent most memory faults from immediately affecting applications and the system, but come at a high and possibly increasing cost as system size increases and fabrication technology continues to scale. To effectively protect against memory faults and errors, a combination of online error-checking and correcting codes are used in conjunction with module replacement. This paper makes two contributions. First, we study the magnitude of the silent data corruption problem when faulty modules are replaced in a timely manner. Second, we show that currently rarely-used fine-grained repair mechanisms drastically reduce both the module replacement rate and the risk of silent data corruption in large systems.