ArmorAll

Abstract

The vulnerability of GPUs to soft errors has become a first-class design concern as they are increasingly being used in accuracy-sensitive and safety-critical domains. Existing solutions used to enhance the reliability of GPUs come with significant overhead in terms of area, power, and/or performance. In this article, we propose ArmorAll, a light-weight, adaptive, selective, and portable software solution to protect GPUs against soft errors. ArmorAll consists of a set of purely compiler-based redundancy schemes designed to optimize instruction duplication on GPUs, thereby enabling much more reliable execution. The choice of the scheme determines the subset of instructions that must be duplicated in an application, allowing adaptable fault coverage for different applications. ArmorAll can intelligently select a redundancy scheme that provides the best coverage to an application with an accuracy of 91.7%. The high coverage provided by ArmorAll comes at an average improvement of 64.5% in runtime when using the selected redundancy scheme as compared to the state-of-the-art.