On the evaluation of SEU effects in GPGPUs

Abstract

General Purpose Graphic Processing Units (GPGPUs) are effective solutions for high-demand data applications which involve multi-signal, image and video processing thanks to their powerful parallel architecture. In the last years, GPGPUs have been considered also for safety-critical applications, such as autonomous and semi-autonomous car driving systems. New GPGPU devices include an increasing number of parallel cores in order to increase throughput and performance. This increment in the number of cores and the requirements in terms of power consumption force designers to use aggressive semiconductor technologies. Nevertheless, those new devices can be seriously affected by radiation effects, modeled as Single Event Upsets (SEUs). SEUs could generate unexpected operation effects in the applications which could be unacceptable for the safety-critical ones. This work analyzes the SEU effects resorting to an open-source model of a GPGPU based on the Nvidia’s G80 architecture and aims at complementing previous analysis based on radiation experiments.