ReaLM: Reliable and Efficient Large Language Model Inference with Statistical Algorithm-Based Fault Tolerance

The demand for efficient large language model (LLM) inference has propelled the development of dedicated accelerators. As accelerators are vulnerable to hardware faults due to aging, variation, etc, existing accelerator designs often reserve a large voltage margin or leverage algorithm-based fault tolerance (ABFT) techniques to ensure LLM inference correctness. However, previous methods often overlook the inherent fault tolerance of LLMs, leading to high computation and energy overhead. To enable reliable yet efficient LLM inference, in this paper, we propose a novel algorithm/circuit co-design framework, dubbed ReaLM. For the first time, we systematically characterize the fault tolerance of LLMs by performing a large-scale error injection study of representative LLMs and natural language understanding tasks. Then, we propose a statistical ABFT algorithm that fully leverages the error robustness to minimize error recovery as much as possible. We also customize the error detection circuits to enable a low-cost online collection of error statistics. Extensive experiments show that with only 1.42% circuit area and 1.79% power overhead, our ReaLM can reduce perplexity degradation from 18.54 to 0.29. Compared to existing methods, ReaLM consistently reduces recovery costs across different operating voltages and improves energy efficiency by up to 35.83% without compromising LLM performance. Our error injection code is available at https://github.com/2000012835xt/ReaLM-DAC.