Title
HyCA: A Hybrid Computing Architecture for Fault-Tolerant Deep Learning
Abstract
Hardware faults on the regular 2-D computing array of a typical deep learning accelerator (DLA) can lead to dramatic prediction accuracy loss. Prior redundancy design approaches typically have each homogeneous redundant processing element (PE) to mitigate faulty PEs for a limited region of the 2-D computing array rather than the entire computing array to avoid the excessive hardware overhead. However, they fail to recover the computing array when the number of faulty PEs in any region exceeds the number of redundant PEs in the same region. The mismatch problem deteriorates when the fault injection rate rises and the faults are unevenly distributed. To address the problem, we propose a hybrid computing architecture (HyCA) for fault-tolerant DLAs. It has a set of dot-production processing units (DPPUs) to recompute all the operations that are mapped to the faulty PEs despite the faulty PE locations. According to our experiments, HyCA shows significantly higher reliability, scalability, and performance with less chip area penalty when compared to the conventional redundancy approaches. Moreover, by taking advantage of the flexible recomputing, HyCA can also be utilized to scan the entire 2-D computing array and detect the faulty PEs effectively at runtime.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1109/TCAD.2021.3124763
IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Deep learning accelerator (DLA),fault detection,fault tolerance,hybrid computing architecture (HyCA)
Journal
41
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
10
0278-0070
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
18
8
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Cheng Liu18815.87
Cheng Chu201.01
Dawen Xu3113.45
Ying Wang400.34
Qianlong Wang500.34
Huawei Li641756.32
Xinrong Li71266157.76
Kwang-Ting Cheng85755513.90