High performance fault-tolerant approach based on simultaneous multithreading

To cope with the ever-increasing susceptibility to transient fault in modern processors, a scheme called Tri-modular Redundantly and Simultaneously Threaded processor with Recovery is proposed, which provides transient fault coverage and reconfiguration from partial permanent fault with high performance. Besides two redundant thread contexts, an arbitrator context is introduced to act as either arbitrator or ordinary thread, which can make better use of hardware resources. Its sphere of replication is reconfigurable and flexible in handling changing demands. The simulation with 11 SPEC2000 benchmarks shows that its performance outperforms SMT-Single by 21.5% on average, while maintaining flexibility and fault-tolerant capability.