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Reduced Precision DWC: an Efficient Hardening Strategy for Mixed-Precision Architectures

  • Duplication with Comparison (DWC) is an effective software-level solution to improve the reliability of computing devices. However, it introduces significant performance and energy consumption overheads that could render the protected application unsuitable for high-performance computing or real-time safety-critical applications. Modern computing architectures offer the possibility to execute operations in various precisions, and recent NVIDIA GPUs even feature dedicated functional units for computing with programmable accuracy. In this work, we propose Reduced-Precision Duplication with Comparison (RP-DWC) as a means to leverage the available mixed-precision hardware resources to implement software-level fault detection with reduced overheads. We discuss the benefits and challenges associated with RP-DWC and show that the intrinsic difference between the mixed-precision copies allows for the detection of most, but not all, errors. However, as the undetected faults are the ones that fall into the difference between precisions, theyDuplication with Comparison (DWC) is an effective software-level solution to improve the reliability of computing devices. However, it introduces significant performance and energy consumption overheads that could render the protected application unsuitable for high-performance computing or real-time safety-critical applications. Modern computing architectures offer the possibility to execute operations in various precisions, and recent NVIDIA GPUs even feature dedicated functional units for computing with programmable accuracy. In this work, we propose Reduced-Precision Duplication with Comparison (RP-DWC) as a means to leverage the available mixed-precision hardware resources to implement software-level fault detection with reduced overheads. We discuss the benefits and challenges associated with RP-DWC and show that the intrinsic difference between the mixed-precision copies allows for the detection of most, but not all, errors. However, as the undetected faults are the ones that fall into the difference between precisions, they are the ones that produce a much smaller impact in the application output. We investigate, through fault injection and beam experiment campaigns, using three microbenchmarks and two real applications on Volta GPUs, RP-DWC impact into fault detection, performance, and energy consumption. We show that RP-DWC achieves an excellent coverage (up to 86%) with minimal overheads (0.1% time and 24% energy consumption overhead).show moreshow less

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Metadaten
Author: Fernando Fernandes dos Santos, Marcelo Brandalero, Rubens Luiz Rech Junior, Michael Hübner, Paolo Rech, Michael Sullivan, Pedro Martins Basso, Luigi Carro
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1109/TC.2021.3058872
ISSN:0018-9340
Title of the source (English):IEEE Transactions on Computers
Document Type:Scientific journal article peer-reviewed
Language:English
Year of publication:2021
Volume/Year:71(2022)
Issue number:3
First Page:573
Last Page:586
Faculty/Chair:Fakultät 1 MINT - Mathematik, Informatik, Physik, Elektro- und Informationstechnik / FG Technische Informatik
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