The Impact of SoC Integration and OS Deployment on the Reliability of Arm Processors

Arm CPU architectures, thanks to their efficiency and flexibility, have been widely adopted in portable user devices such as smartphones, tablets, and laptops. Recently, the high computing efficiency, together with the unique possibility that Arm offers to adapt the architecture for a specific application, pushed the adoption of Arm-based systems both in HPC (High Performance Computing) applications and autonomous vehicles. The possibility of modifying Arm architecture can potentially be extremely beneficial, as selective fault tolerance solutions can be added at the microarchitectural level. The current trend in the design of computing devices is to integrate several functionalities on the same SoC (System-On-Chip). Modern SoCs usually integrate (one or more) CPUs and (one or more) accelerators, such as GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) or FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays). These SoCs typically allow the computing cores to share common memories, which significantly improves the performance and reduces the total power consumption but may impact the system's reliability. In this work, we have evaluated the impact of SoC integration and OS deployment using beam experiments and microarchitectural fault injection.