Stress-Resiliency of AI Implementations on FPGAs

FPGAs have become a popular choice for machine learning acceleration for both cloud and edge devices. While traditional neural networks show impressive performance in classification tasks, Hyperdimensional Computing (HDC) is rapidly emerging as a promising novel machine learning approach for its hardware-friendly inference. In HDC, classes are embedded into high-dimensional vectors during training, and inputs can be classified by computing similarity metrics between class-vectors during inference. HDC inference is especially promoted in terms of its resiliency against errors, attributed to the large inherent redundancy. In this work, we perform a thorough experimental investigation of the fault resiliency of various FPGA-based machine learning implementations under different aspects of stress, comparing HDC with classical neural network approaches. We explore both the amount of faulty classifications as well as system crashes while subjecting the designs to timing stress using overclocking, voltage stress with excessive switching activity, and thermal stress.