Error Containment

The NVIDIA Ampere architecture introduces the concept of error containment to NVIDIA GPUs. The benefit of error containment is being able to limit the impact of uncorrectable ECC errors on GPU applications. Uncorrectable ECC errors on prior architectures such as NVIDIA Volta™ impacted all of the currently executing GPU workloads. On NVIDIA data center-class GPUS starting with Ampere architecture the impact will be limited to the applications that encounter the error. All other workloads will continue running unaffected both in terms of accuracy and performance, and new workloads can be launched. Unlike earlier GPU architectures, NVIDIA Ampere and later generation class GPUs do not require a GPU reset when memory errors occur.

Note

While most frequently occurring classes of uncorrectable errors are contained, there can be rare cases where uncorrectable errors are still uncontained and might impact all the workloads being processed in the GPU.