Effectiveness of machine checks for error diagnostics

Abstract

Machine Check Architecture (MCA) is a processor internal architecture subsystem that detects and logs correctable and uncorrectable errors in the data or control paths in each CPU core and the Northbridge. These errors include parity errors associated with caches, TLBs, ECC errors associated with caches and DRAM, and system bus errors. This paper reports on an experimental study on: (i) monitoring a computing cluster for machine checks and using this data to identify patterns that can be employed for error diagnostics and (ii) introducing faults into the machine to understand the resulting machine checks and correlate this data with relevant performance metrics.