Demystifying GPU Reliability: Comparing and Combining Beam Experiments, Fault Simulation, and Profiling

Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) have moved from being dedicated devices for multimedia and gaming applications to general-purpose accelerators employed in High-Performance Computing (HPC) and safety-critical applications such as autonomous vehicles. This market shift led to a burst in the GPU's computing capabilities and efficiency, significant improvements in the programming frameworks and performance evaluation tools, and a concern about their hardware reliability. In this paper, we compare and combine high-energy neutron beam experiments that account for more than 13 million years of natural terrestrial exposure, extensive architectural-level fault simulations that required more than 350 GPU hours (using SASSIFI and NVBitFI), and detailed application-level profiling. Our main goal is to answer one of the fundamental open questions in GPU reliability evaluation: whether fault simulation provides representative results that can be used to predict the failure rates of workloads running on GPUs. We show that, in most cases, fault simulation-based prediction for silent data corruptions is sufficiently close (differences lower than 5×) to the experimentally measured rates. We also analyze the reliability of some of the main GPU functional units (including mixed-precision and tensor cores). We find that the way GPU resources are instantiated plays a critical role in the overall system reliability and that faults outside the functional units generate most detectable errors.