Seeking out silent threats to simulation integrity
Wednesday, September 11, 2013 - 08:30
in Earth & Climate
Large-scale computing has become a necessity for solving the nation's most intractable problems. Due to their sheer number of cores, high-end computers increasingly exhibit intermittently incorrect behaviors—referred to as "soft errors"—placing the validity of simulation results at risk. A team of scientists at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory investigated the impact of soft errors on a full optimization algorithm. The team found that without intervention, soft errors would invalidate simulations in a significant fraction of all cases. They also found that 95% of the soft errors can be corrected.