Cosmic rays are a big problem for supercomputers. There was a very interesting piece [1] on it in Spectrum recently. One of the funniest anecdotes was about a D

Cosmic rays are a big problem for supercomputers. There was a very interesting piece [1] on it in Spectrum recently. One of the funniest anecdotes was about a DEC AlphaServers machine installed at Los Alamos, where they had to put a running server blade inside a neutron beam and confirm the error rates spiked in order to convince the manufacturer that the machines were improperly shielded. [1] http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/how-to-kill-a-supercomputer-dirty-power-cosmic-rays-and-bad-solder http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/how-to-kill-a-su...