Harnessing the Effects of Process Variability to Mitigate Aging in Cloud Servers

The increasing number of cores within a single chip enables more powerful cloud servers to exploit request-level parallelism better. However, this also leads to unforeseen temperature issues, which may accelerate aging and cause soft-errors or even failures. Therefore, smartly managing temperature has become critical and unpredictable due to the inherent process variability - since the temperature will vary across the cores regardless if they operate at the same operating frequency. Based on that, we propose a framework to optimize cloud servers’ lifetime, which automatically distributes the workload among the cores and applies DVFS based on the applications’ behavior and systems status.