Power and Performance Costs of Radiation-Hardened ML Inference Models Running on Edge Devices

Integrating Machine Learning (ML) inference models into edge computing devices has introduced several challenges related to improving power efficiency, performance, and reliability. As the susceptibility of these models to radiation-induced soft errors is a significant concern, applying lightweight mitigation techniques is key, mostly due to power and memory constraints inherent to edge devices. In this regard, assessing the potential power and performance penalties associated with deploying soft error mitigation techniques on customized ML inference models running in such resource-constrained devices is crucial. This paper, therefore, investigates the performance and power consumption implications of applying software-based mitigation techniques on ML inference models optimized for edge devices. The experiments demonstrate that implementing RAT technique reduced up to 3.2 x the susceptibility to the occurrence of soft errors caused by radiation with low performance and power consumption costs w.r.t. a P-TMR technique.