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

Abstract—Soft Error Resiliency is a major concern for Pet-ascale high performance computing (HPC) systems. Blue Gene/Q (BG/Q) is the third generation of IBM’s massively parallel, ener-gy 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 soft-ware resiliency inherent in these applications through applica-tion-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 applica-tions that lead to many masking improvement opportunities. Keywords—soft error rate, co-design, chip irradiation, fault in-jection, high-performance applications I