Reliability for general purpose processing on the GPU (GPGPU) is becoming a weak link in the construction of reliable supercomputer systems. Because hardware protection is expensive to develop, requires dedicated on-chip resources, and is not portable across different architectures, the efficiency of software solutions such as redundant multithreading (RMT) must be explored. This paper presents a real-world design and evaluation of automatic software RMT on GPU hardware. We first describe a compiler pass that automatically converts GPGPU kernels into redundantly threaded versions. We then perform detailed power and performance evaluations of three RMT algorithms, each of which provides fault coverage to a set of structures in the GPU. Using real hardware, we show that compiler-managed software RMT has highly variable costs. We further analyze the individual costs of redundant work scheduling, redundant computation, and inter-thread communication, showing that no single component in general is responsible for high overheads across all applications; instead, certain workload properties tend to cause RMT to perform well or poorly. Finally, we demonstrate the benefit of architectural support for RMT with a specific example of fast, register-level thread communication.
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