CAROL-FI: an Efficient Fault-Injection Tool for Vulnerability Evaluation of Modern HPC Parallel Accelerators

Abstract

Transient faults are a major problem for large scale HPC systems, and the mitigation of adverse fault effects need to be highly efficient as we approach exascale. We developed a fault injection tool (CAROL-FI) to identify the potential sources of adverse fault effects. With a deeper understanding of such effects, we provide useful insights to design efficient mitigation techniques, like selective hardening of critical portions of the code. We performed a fault injection campaign injecting more than 67,000 faults into an Intel Xeon Phi executing six representative HPC programs. We show that selective hardening can be successfully applied to DGEMM and Hotspot while LavaMD and NW may require a complete code hardening.