Analysing the radiation reliability, performance and energy consumption of low-power SoC through heterogeneous parallelism

Abstract

This study focuses on the low-power Tegra X1 System-on-Chip (SoC) from the Jetson Nano Developer Kit, which is increasingly used in various environments and tasks. As these SoCs grow in prevalence, it becomes crucial to analyse their computational performance, energy consumption, and reliability, especially for safety-critical applications. A key factor examined in this paper is the SoC’s neutron radiation tolerance. This is explored by subjecting a parallel version of matrix multiplication, which has been offloaded to various hardware components via OpenMP, to neutron irradiation. Through this approach, this researcher establishes a correlation between the SoC’s reliability and its computational and energy performance. The analysis enables the identification of an optimal workload distribution strategy, considering factors such as execution time, energy efficiency, and system reliability. Experimental results reveal that, while the GPU executes matrix multiplication tasks more rapidly and efficiently than the CPU, using both components only marginally reduces execution time. Interestingly, GPU usage significantly increases the SoC’s critical section, leading to an escalated error rate for both Detected Unrecoverable Errors (DUE) and Silent Data Corruptions (SDC), with the CPU showing a higher average number of affected elements per SDC.