Predicting the Soft Error Vulnerability of GPGPU Applications

Abstract

As Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) have evolved to deliver performance increases for general-purpose computations as well as graphics and multimedia applications, soft error reliability becomes an important concern. The soft error vulnerability of the applications is evaluated via fault injection experiments. Since performing fault injection takes impractical times to cover the fault locations in complex GPU hardware structures, prediction-based techniques have been proposed to evaluate the soft error vulnerability of General-Purpose GPU (GPGPU) programs based on the hardware performance characteristics.In this work, we propose ML-based prediction models for the soft error vulnerability evaluation of GPGPU programs. We consider both program characteristics and hardware performance metrics collected from either the simulation or the profiling tools. While we utilize regression models for the prediction of the masked fault rates, we build classification models to specify the vulnerability level of the programs based on their silent data corruption (SDC) and crash rates. Our prediction models achieve maximum prediction accuracy rates of 96.6%, 82.6%, and 87% for masked fault rates, SDCs, and crashes, respectively.