Understanding Soft Error Resiliency of Blue Gene/Q Compute Chip through Hardware Proton Irradiation and Software Fault Injection

Abstract

Soft Error Resiliency is a major concern for Petascale high performance computing (HPC) systems. Blue Gene/Q (BG/Q) is the third generation of IBM's massively parallel, energy efficient Blue Gene series of supercomputers. The principal goal of this work is to understand the interaction between Blue-Gene/Q's hardware resiliency features and high-performance applications through proton irradiation of a real chip, and software resiliency inherent in these applications through application-level fault injection (AFI) experiments. From the proton irradiation experiments we derived that the mean time between correctable errors at sea level of the SRAM-based register files and Level-1 caches for a system similar to the scale of Sequoia system. From the AFI experiments, we characterized relative vulnerability among the applications in both general purpose and floating point register files. We categorized and quantified the failure outcomes, and discovered characteristics in the applications that lead to many masking improvement opportunities.