Evaluating an XOR-based Hybrid Fault Tolerance Technique to Detect Faults in GPU Pipelines

Graphics Processing Units are consistently reaching new applications due to their massive parallel execution architectures. However, some safety-critical areas, such as avionics, come with unfriendly environments due to radiation effects caused by cosmic rays, effectively causing component failures. This work implements and tests a hybrid fault tolerance technique initially proposed by NVIDIA to protect a GPU’s pipeline against radiation effects. Results show that the technique can be effective against data-flow errors but at a high cost in execution time overheads and potentially increased control-flow errors.