Fault-tolerance and two-level pipelining in VLSI systolic arrays
The authors address two important issues in systolic array designs: fault-tolerance and two-level pipelining. The proposed systolic fault-tolerant scheme maintains the original data flow pattern by bypassing defective cells with a few registers. As a result, many of the desirable properties of systolic arrays (such as local and regular communication between cells) are preserved. Two-level pipelining refers to the use of pipelined functional units in the implementation of systolic cells. The authors paper addresses the problem of efficiently utilizing pipelined units to increase the overall system throughput. They show that both of these problems can be reduced to the same mathematical problem of incorporating extra delays on certain data paths in originally correct systolic designs. They introduce the mathematical notion of a cut which enables them to handle this problem effectively. The results obtained by applying the techniques described are encouraging. When applied to systolic arrays without feedback cycles, the arrays can tolerate large numbers of failures (with the addition of very little hardware) while maintaining the original throughput. Furthermore, all of the pipeline stages in the cells can be kept fully utilized through the addition of a small number of delay registers. However, adding delays to systolic arrays with cycles typically induces a significant decrease in throughput. In response to this, they have derived a new class of systolic algorithms in which the data cycle around a ring of processing cells. The systolic ring architecture has the property that its performance degrades gracefully as cells fail. Using the cut theory for arrays without feedback and the ring architecture approach for those with feedback, they have effective fault-tolerant and two-level pipelining schemes for most systolic arrays. 24 references.
- OSTI ID:
- 5082441
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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