{"id":86315,"date":"2019-01-02T00:22:42","date_gmt":"2019-01-02T08:22:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/01\/cosmic-ray-showers-crash-supercomputers-heres-what-to-do-about-it"},"modified":"2019-01-02T00:22:42","modified_gmt":"2019-01-02T08:22:42","slug":"cosmic-ray-showers-crash-supercomputers-heres-what-to-do-about-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/01\/cosmic-ray-showers-crash-supercomputers-heres-what-to-do-about-it","title":{"rendered":"Cosmic Ray Showers Crash Supercomputers. Here\u2019s What to Do About It"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

The Cray-1 supercomputer<\/a>, the world\u2019s fastest back in the 1970s, does not look<\/a> like a supercomputer. It looks like a mod version of that carnival ride The Round Up<\/em>, the one where you stand, strapped in, as it dizzies you up. It\u2019s surrounded by a padded bench that conceals its power supplies, like a cake donut, if the hole was capable of providing insights about nuclear weapons.<\/p>\n

After Seymour Cray first built this computer<\/a>, he gave Los Alamos National Laboratory a six-month free trial. But during that half-year, a funny thing happened: The computer experienced 152 unattributable memory errors. Later<\/a>, researchers would learn that cosmic-ray neutrons can slam into processor parts, corrupting their data. The higher you are, and the bigger your computers, the more significant a problem this is. And Los Alamos\u20147,300 feet up and home to some of the world\u2019s swankiest processors\u2014is a prime target.<\/p>\n

The world has changed a lot since then, and so have computers. But space has not. And so Los Alamos has had to adapt\u2014having its engineers account for space particles in its hard- and software. \u201cThis is not really a problem we\u2019re having,\u201d explains Nathan DeBardeleben of the High Performance Computing Design group. \u201cIt\u2019s a problem we\u2019re keeping at bay.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Cray-1 supercomputer, the world\u2019s fastest back in the 1970s, does not look like a supercomputer. It looks like a mod version of that carnival ride The Round Up, the one where you stand, strapped in, as it dizzies you up. It\u2019s surrounded by a padded bench that conceals its power supplies, like a cake [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,48,8,44],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-86315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-military","category-particle-physics","category-space","category-supercomputing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86315"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86315\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}