Analyzing the criticality of transient faults-induced SDCs on GPU applications

In this paper we compare the soft-error sensitivity of parallel applications on modern Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) obtained through architectural-level fault injections and high-energy particle beam radiation experiments. Fault-injection and beam experiments provide different information and uses different transient-fault sensitivity metrics, which are hard to combine. In this paper we show how correlating beam and fault-injection data can provide a deeper understanding of the behavior of GPUs in the occurrence of transient faults. In particular, we demonstrate that commonly used architecture-level fault models (and fast injection tools) can be used to identify critical kernels and to associate some experimentally observed output errors with their causes. Additionally, we show how register file and instruction-level injections can be used to evaluate ECC efficiency in reducing the radiation-induced error rate.