Compiler-directed soft error resilience for lightweight GPU register file protection

Abstract

This paper presents Penny, a compiler-directed resilience scheme for protecting GPU register files (RF) against soft errors. Penny replaces the conventional error correction code (ECC) based RF protection by using less expensive error detection code (EDC) along with idempotence based recovery. Compared to the ECC protection, Penny can achieve either the same level of RF resilience yet with significantly lower hardware costs or stronger resilience using the same ECC due to its ability to detect multi-bit errors when it is used solely for detection. In particular, to address the lack of store buffers in GPUs, which causes both checkpoint storage overwriting and the high cost of checkpointing stores, Penny provides several compiler optimizations such as storage coloring and checkpoint pruning. Across 25 benchmarks, Penny causes only ≈3% run-time overhead on average.