Terrestrial-Based Radiation Upsets: A Cautionary Tale

Authors:
Heather Quinn;Paul Graham
Affiliations:
Los Alamos National Laboratory;Los Alamos National Laboratory
Venue:
FCCM '05 Proceedings of the 13th Annual IEEE Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines
Year:
2005

Citing 0
Cited 9

Soft error vulnerability of iterative linear algebra methods

Proceedings of the 22nd annual international conference on Supercomputing
Proactive process-level live migration in HPC environments

Proceedings of the 2008 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing
Tile-Based Fault Tolerant Approach Using Partial Reconfiguration

ARC '09 Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Reconfigurable Computing: Architectures, Tools and Applications
Reconfigurable Computing: The Theory and Practice of FPGA-Based Computation

Reconfigurable Computing: The Theory and Practice of FPGA-Based Computation
From Silicon to Science: The Long Road to Production Reconfigurable Supercomputing

ACM Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems (TRETS)
Space-based FPGA radio receiver design, debug, and development of a radiation-tolerant computing system

International Journal of Reconfigurable Computing - Special issue on selected papers from ReconFig 2009 International conference on reconfigurable computing and FPGAs (ReconFig 2009)
Proactive process-level live migration and back migration in HPC environments

Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing
Experimental framework for injecting logic errors in a virtual machine to profile applications for soft error resilience

Euro-Par'11 Proceedings of the 2011 international conference on Parallel Processing - Volume 2
Detection and correction of silent data corruption for large-scale high-performance computing

SC '12 Proceedings of the International Conference on High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Problems with terrestrial-based neutron radiation from cosmic rays have become more commonplace. While the incident rate from neutron radiation is lower than space-based radiation, physics, system design and system locations have combined to make systems increasingly vulnerable to terrestrial radiation. FPGA systems are particularly sensitive to neutron radiation, as the FPGAs, microprocessors and memory are all sensitive to upsets. We are interested in reconfigurable supercomputers,which need to be highly reliable and highly available despite being very sensitive to radiation. In this paper, we estimate the error rate for FPGAs, memory, and microprocessors so that predictions for the sensitivity of the Cray XD1 reconfigurable supercomputer can be made. We also present possible mitigation methods that are appropriate for neutron radiation upset rates.