How To Kill A Supercomputer: Dirty Power, Cosmic Rays, and Bad Solder

As a child, were you ever afraid that a monster lurking in your bedroom would leap out of the dark and get you? My job at Oak Ridge National Laboratory is to worry about a similar monster, hiding in the steel cabinets of the supercomputers and threatening to crash the largest computing machines on the planet. The monster is something supercomputer specialists call resilience—or rather the lack of resilience. It has bitten several supercomputers in the past.

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