Evaluating the Impact of In-band ECC on GPU Performance

In the rapidly evolving landscape of GPU applications, ensuring reliability against memory errors is paramount. Memory errors are a significant source of hardware failures, necessitating robust GPU memory protection mechanisms like Error Correcting Codes (ECC). Current ECC implementations in GPUs, particularly in-band ECC used with Graphics DDR (GDDR) memories, aim to safeguard against these errors. However, in-band ECC significantly hampers performance due to the necessity of separate data and redundancy transfers, leading to increased latency and reduced throughputs. This paper examines performance impact of in-band ECC on GPUs.