Characterizing GPU Resilience and Impact on AI/HPC Systems

In this study, we characterize GPU failures in Delta, the current large-scale AI system with over 600 petaflops of peak compute throughput. The system comprises GPU and non-GPU nodes with modern AI accelerators, such as NVIDIA A40, A100, and H100 GPUs. The study uses two and a half years of data on GPU errors. We evaluate the resilience of GPU hardware components to determine the vulnerability of different GPU components to failure and their impact on the GPU and node availability. We measure the key propagation paths in GPU hardware, GPU interconnect (NVLink), and GPU memory. Finally, we evaluate the impact of the observed GPU errors on user jobs. Our key findings are: (i) Contrary to common beliefs, GPU memory is over 30x more reliable than GPU hardware in terms of MTBE (mean time between errors). (ii) The newly introduced GSP (GPU System Processor) is the most vulnerable GPU hardware component. (iii) NVLink errors did not always lead to user job failure, and we attribute it to the underlying error detection and retry mechanisms employed. (iv) We show multiple examples of hardware errors originating from one of the key GPU hardware components, leading to application failure. (v) We project the impact of GPU node availability on larger scales with emulation and find that significant overprovisioning between 5-20% would be necessary to handle GPU failures. If GPU availability were improved to 99.9%, the overprovisioning would be reduced by 4x.

Building Machine Learning Challenges for Anomaly Detection in Science

Scientific discoveries are often made by finding a pattern or object that was not predicted by the known rules of science. Oftentimes, these anomalous events or objects that do not conform to the norms are an indication that the rules of science governing the data are incomplete, and something new needs to be present to explain these unexpected outliers. The challenge of finding anomalies can be confounding since it requires codifying a complete knowledge of the known scientific behaviors and then projecting these known behaviors on the data to look for deviations. When utilizing machine learning, this presents a particular challenge since we require that the model not only understands scientific data perfectly but also recognizes when the data is inconsistent and out of the scope of its trained behavior. In this paper, we present three datasets aimed at developing machine learning-based anomaly detection for disparate scientific domains covering astrophysics, genomics, and polar science. We present the different datasets along with a scheme to make machine learning challenges around the three datasets findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR). Furthermore, we present an approach that generalizes to future machine learning challenges, enabling the possibility of large, more compute-intensive challenges that can ultimately lead to scientific discovery.