Algorithmic Strategies for Sustainable Reuse of Neural Network Accelerators with Permanent Faults

Hardware failures are a growing challenge for machine learning accelerators, many of which are based on systolic arrays. When a permanent hardware failure occurs in a systolic array, existing solutions include localizing and isolating the faulty processing element (PE), using a redundant PE for re-execution, or in some extreme cases decommissioning the entire accelerator for further investigation. In this paper, we propose novel algorithmic approaches that mitigate permanent hardware faults in neural network (NN) accelerators by uniquely integrating the behavior of the faulty component instead of bypassing it. In doing so, we aim for a more sustainable use of the accelerator where faulty hardware is neither bypassed nor discarded, instead being given a second life. We first introduce a CUDA-accelerated systolic array simulator in PyTorch, which enabled us to quantify the impact of permanent faults appearing on links connecting two PEs or in weight registers, where one bit is stuck at 0 or 1 in the float32, float16, or bfloat16 representation. We then propose several algorithmic mitigation techniques for a subset of stuck-at faults, such as Invertible Scaling or Shifting of activations and weights, or fine tuning with the faulty behavior. Notably, the proposed techniques do not require any hardware modification, instead relying on existing components of widely used systolic array based accelerators, such as normalization, activation, and storage units. Extensive experimental evaluations using fully connected and convolutional NNs trained on MNIST, CIFAR-10 and ImageNet show that the proposed fault-tolerant approach matches or gets very close to the original fault-free accuracy.