Improving Application Resilience to Memory Errors with Lightweight Compression

In next-generation extreme-scale systems, application performance will be limited by memory performance characteristics. The first exascale system is projected to contain many petabytes of memory. In addition to the sheer volume of the memory required, device trends, such as shrinking feature sizes and reduced supply voltages, have the potential to increase the frequency of memory errors. As a result, resilience to memory errors is a key challenge. In this paper, we evaluate the viability of using memory compression to repair detectable uncorrectable errors (DUEs) in memory. We develop a software library, evaluate its performance and demonstrate that it is able to significantly compress memory of HPC applications. Further, we show that exploiting compressed memory pages to correct memory errors can significantly improve application performance on next-generation systems.