The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis
The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis
Authors: Juan David Guerrero Balaguera and Josie Esteban Rodriguez Condia (Politecnico di Torino); Fernando Fernandes dos Santos (University of Rennes, Inria Rennes - Bretagne Atlantique Research Centre); Matteo Sonza Reorda (Politecnico di Torino); and Paolo Rech (University of Trento)
Abstract: Modern Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) demand life expectancy extended to many years, exposing the hardware to aging (i.e., permanent faults arising after the end-of-manufacturing test). Hence, techniques to assess permanent fault impacts in GPUs are strongly required, especially in safety-critical domains.
This paper presents a method to evaluate permanent faults in the GPU's scheduler and control units, together with the first figures to quantify these effects. We inject 5.83x10^5 permanent faults in the gate-level units of a GPU model. Then, we map the observed error categories as software errors by instrumenting 13 applications and two convolutional neural networks, injecting more than 1.65x10^5 permanent errors (1,000 errors per application), reducing evaluation times from several years to hundreds of hours. Our results highlight that faults in GPU parallelism management units impact software execution parameters. Moreover, errors in resource management or instructions codes hang code, while 45% of errors induce silent data corruption.
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