FT-GEMM: A Fault Tolerant High Performance GEMM Implementation on x86 CPUs

Abstract: General matrix/matrix multiplication (GEMM) is crucial for scientific computing and machine learning. However, the increased scale of the computing platforms raises concerns about hardware and software reliability. In this poster, we present FT-GEMM, a high-performance GEMM being capable of tolerating soft errors on-the-fly. We incorporate the fault tolerant functionality at algorithmic level by fusing the memory-intensive operations into the GEMM assembly kernels. We design a cache-friendly scheme for parallel FT-GEMM. Experimental results on Intel Cascade Lake demonstrate that FT-GEMM offers high reliability and performance -- faster than Intel MKL, OpenBLAS, and BLIS by 3.50\%$\sim$ 22.14\% for both serial and parallel GEMM, even under hundreds of errors injected per minute.