Two-level soft error vulnerability prediction on SMT/CMP architectures

Architectural Vulnerability Factor (AVF) [3] quantifies the probability that a raw soft error finally produces a visible error in the program output. It is often used by computer designers as an important reliability metric at the architectural level. However, the AVF measurement is extremely expensive in terms of hardware and computation. In this paper, we characterize and predict a program's AVF under resource contention and sharing with other programs running on Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) and Chip-Multiprocessor (CMP) architectures.