Evaluation of transient errors in GPGPUs for safety critical applications: An effective simulation-based fault injection environment

General Purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPGPUs) are increasingly adopted thanks to their high computational capabilities. GPGPUs are preferable to CPUs for a large range of computationally intensive applications, not necessarily related to computer graphics. Within the high performance computing context, GPGPUs must require a large amount of resources and have plenty execution units. GPGPUs are becoming attractive for safety-critical applications where the phenomenon of transient errors is a major concern. In this paper we propose a novel transient error fault injection simulation methodology for the accurate simulation of GPGPUs applications during the occurrence of transient errors. The developed environment allows to inject transient errors within all the memory area of GPGPUs and into not user-accessible resources such as in streaming processors combinational logic and sequential elements. The capability of the fault injection simulation platform has been evaluated testing three benchmark applications including mitigation approaches such as Duplication With Comparison, Triple Modular Redundancy and Algorithm Based Fault Tolerance. The amount of computational costs and time measured is minimal thus enabling the usage of the developed approach for effective transient errors evaluation.