Transient Fault Detection in Tensor Cores for Modern GPUs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have emerged as an effective solution for many machine learning applications. However, the great success comes with the cost of excessive computation. The Volta graphics processing unit (GPU) from NVIDIA introduced a specialized hardware unit called tensor core (TC) aiming at meeting the growing computation demand needed by DNNs. Most previous studies on TCs have focused on performance improvement through the utilization of the TC's high degree of parallelism. However, as DNNs are deployed into security-sensitive applications such as autonomous driving, the reliability of TCs is as important as performance. In this work, we exploit the unique architectural characteristics of TCs and propose a simple and implementation-efficient hardware technique called fault detection in tensor core (FDTC) to detect transient faults in TCs. In particular, FDTC exploits the zero-valued weights that stem from network pruning as well as sparse activations arising from the common ReLU operator to verify tensor operations. The high level of sparsity in tensors allows FDTC to run original and verifying products simultaneously, leading to zero performance penalty. For applications with a low sparsity rate, FDTC relies on temporal redundancy to re-execute effectual products. FDTC schedules the execution of verifying products only when multipliers are idle. Our experimental results reveal that FDTC offers 100% fault coverage with no performance penalty and small energy overhead in TCs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".