Top

The Journal of Supercomputing

Published in:

23-05-2020

Thermal neutrons: a possible threat for supercomputer reliability

Published in: The Journal of Supercomputing | Issue 2/2021

Activate our intelligent search to find suitable subject content or patents.

search-config

AI-assisted search

Off

Abstract

The high performance, high efficiency, and low cost of Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) devices make them attractive for applications with strict reliability constraints. Today, COTS devices are adopted in HPC and safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving. Unfortunately, the cheap natural boron widely used in COTS chip manufacturing process makes them highly susceptible to thermal (low energy) neutrons. In this paper, we demonstrate that thermal neutrons are a significant threat to COTS device reliability. For our study, we consider two DDR memories, an AMD APU, three NVIDIA GPUs, an Intel accelerator, and an FPGA executing a relevant set of algorithms. We consider different scenarios that impact the thermal neutron flux such as weather, concrete walls and floors, and HPC liquid cooling systems. Correlating beam experiments and neutron detector data, we show that thermal neutrons FIT rate could be comparable or even higher than the high energy neutron FIT rate.

previous article Optimal business process deployment cost in cloud resources

next article ELS: Emulation system for debugging and tuning large-scale parallel programs on small clusters

Dont have a licence yet? Then find out more about our products and how to get one now:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 67.000 Bücher
über 340 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Finance + Banking
Management + Führung
Marketing + Vertrieb
Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now

Springer Professional "Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 67.000 Bücher
über 390 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Automobil + Motoren
Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 102.000 Bücher
über 537 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Automobil + Motoren
Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
Finance + Banking
Management + Führung
Marketing + Vertrieb
Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe
Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now

Lucas R (2014) Top ten exascale research challenges. In: DOE ASCAC Subcommittee Report

Cohen A, Shen X, Torrellas J, Tuck J, Zhou Y, Adve S, Akturk I, Bagchi S, Balasubramonian R, Barik R, Beck M, Bodik R, Butt A, Ceze L, Chen H, Chen Y, Chilimbi T, Christodorescu M, Criswell J, Ding C, Ding Y, Dwarkadas S, Elmroth E, Gibbons P, Guo X, Gupta R, Heiser G, Hoffman H, Huang J, Hunter H, Kim J, King S, Larus J, Liu C, Lu S, Lucia B, Maleki S, Mazumdar S, Neamtiu I, Pingali K, Rech P, Scott M, Solihin Y, Song D, Szefer J, Tsafrir D, Urgaonkar B, Wolf M, Xie Y, Zhao J, Zhong L, Zhu Y (2018) Inter-disciplinary research challenges in computer systems for the 2020s. Tech. rep, National Science Foundation, USA

Dongarra J, Meuer H, Strohmaier E (2015) ISO26262 Standard. https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:std:iso:26262:-1:ed-1:v1:en

Ziegler J, Puchner H (2004) SER-history. A Guide for Designing with Memory ICs (Cypress, Trends and Challenges

Baumann R (2005) Radiation-induced soft errors in advanced semiconductor technologies. IEEE Trans Device Mater Reliab 5(3):305–316. https://doi.org/10.1109/TDMR.2005.853449CrossRef

Snir M, Wisniewski RW, Abraham JA, Adve SV, Bagchi S, Balaji P, Belak J, Bose P, Cappello F, Carlson B, et al (2014) Addressing failures in exascale computing. Int J High Perform Comput Appl 1094342014522573

Dirk J, Nelson ME, Ziegler JF, Thompson A, Zabel TH (2003) Terrestrial thermal neutrons. IEEE Trans Nuclear Sci 50(6):2060CrossRef

JEDEC (2006) Measurement and reporting of alpha particle and terrestrial cosmic ray-induced soft errors in semiconductor devices. Tech. Rep. JESD89A, JEDEC Standard

Baumann R, Hossain T, Smith E, Murata S, Kitagawa H (1995) Boron as a primary source of radiation in high density DRAMs. In: 1995 Symposium on VLSI Technology. Digest of Technical Papers. IEEE. IEEE, Kyoto, Japan, Japan, pp 81–82

10.

Normand E, Vranish K, Sheets A, Stitt M, Kim R (2006) Quantifying the double-sided neutron SEU threat, from low energy (thermal) and high energy>10 MeV) neutrons. IEEE Trans Nucl Sci 53(6):3587CrossRef

11.

Wen SJ, Pai S, Wong R, Romain M, Tam N (2010) B10 finding and correlation to thermal neutron soft error rate sensitivity for SRAMs in the sub-micron technology. In: 2010 IEEE International Integrated Reliability Workshop Final Report (IEEE), pp 31–33

12.

Weulersse C, Houssany S, Guibbaud N, Segura-Ruiz J, Beaucour J, Miller F, Mazurek M (2018) Contribution of thermal neutrons to soft error rate. IEEE Trans Nucl Sci 65(8):1851CrossRef

13.

Lee S, Kim I, Ha S, Yu Cs, Noh J, Pae S, Park J (2015) Radiation-induced soft error rate analyses for 14 nm FinFET SRAM devices. In: 2015 IEEE International Reliability Physics Symposium. IEEE (IEEE), pp 4B–1

14.

Fang YP, Oates AS (2016) Characterization of single bit and multiple cell soft error events in planar and FinFET SRAMs. IEEE Trans Device Mater Reliab 16(2):132CrossRef

15.

Maillard P, Hart M, Barton J, Jain P, Karp J (2015) Neutron, 64 MeV proton, thermal neutron and alpha single-event upset characterization of Xilinx 20nm UltraScale Kintex FPGA. In: 2015 IEEE Radiation Effects Data Workshop (REDW) (IEEE, 2015), pp 1–5

16.

Hess VF (1913) Über den Ursprung der durchdringenden Strahlung. Z Phys 14:610

17.

Ziegler JF (1996) Terrestrial cosmic rays. IBM J Res Dev 40(1):19. https://doi.org/10.1147/rd.401.0019CrossRef

18.

Hands A, Morris P, Ryden K, Dyer C, Truscott P, Chugg A, Parker S (2011) Single event effects in power MOSFETs due to atmospheric and thermal neutrons. IEEE Trans Nucl Sci 58(6):2687CrossRef

19.

Baumann R (2000) Soft error characterization and modeling methodologies at Texas Instruments. In: Proceedings of the Semiconductor Research Council 4th Topical Conference Reliability.[CD-Rom] SemaTech CD-ROM (SemaTech, USA), pp 0043–3283

20.

Sheu R, Jiang S (2003) Cosmic-ray-induced neutron spectra and effective dose rates near air/ground and air/water interfaces in Taiwan. Health Phys 84(1):92CrossRef

21.

Patterson MK, Fenwick D (2008) The state of datacenter cooling. Intel Corporation White Paper. http://download.intel.com/technology/eep/data-center-efficiency/stateof-date-center-cooling.pdf

22.

Summit system overview (2006). https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Intro_Summit_System_Overview.pdf

23.

Capozzoli A, Primiceri G (2015) Cooling systems in data centers: state of art and emerging technologies. Energy Procedia 83:484CrossRef

24.

Dongarra J, Meuer H, Strohmaier E (2018) TOP500 Supercomputer Sites: November 2018. http://www.top500.org

25.

Gao T, David M, Geer J, Schmidt R, Sammakia B (2015) Experimental and numerical dynamic investigation of an energy efficient liquid cooled chiller-less data center test facility. Energy Build 91:83CrossRef

26.

Ellsworth M, Campbell L, Simons R, Iyengar M, Schmidt R, Chu R (2008) The evolution of water cooling for IBM large server systems: Back to the future. In: 2008 11th Intersociety Conference on Thermal and Thermomechanical Phenomena in Electronic Systems. IEEE (IEEE), pp 266–274

27.

Ellsworth MJ, Goth GF, Zoodsma RJ, Arvelo A, Campbell LA, Anderl WJ (2012) An overview of the IBM power 775 supercomputer water cooling system. J Electron Packag 134(2):020906CrossRef

28.

Che S, Boyer M, Meng J, Tarjan D, Sheaffer JW, Lee SH, Skadron K (2009) Rodinia: a benchmark suite for heterogeneous computing. In: Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Workload Characterization (IISWC). Austin, TX, USA, IEEE, pp 44–54

29.

Fragkiadaki K, Zhang W, Zhang G, Shi J (2012) Two-granularity tracking: mediating trajectory and detection graphs for tracking under occlusions In: European Conference on Computer Vision. Springer, pp 552–565

30.

DIMACS. 9th dimacs (2006). www.dis.uniroma1.it/challenge9/download.shtml

31.

Redmon J, Divvala SK, Girshick RB, Farhadi A (2015) You only look once: unified, real-time object detection. CoRR abs/1506.02640. http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.02640

32.

Deng L (2012) The MNIST database of handwritten digit images for machine learning research [best of the web]. IEEE Signal Process Mag 29(6):141. https://doi.org/10.1109/msp.2012.2211477CrossRef

33.

Cazzaniga C, Frost CD (2018) Progress of the Scientific Commissioning of a fast neutron beamline for Chip Irradiation. J Phys: Conf Ser 1021:012037

34.

Chiesa D, Nastasi M, Cazzaniga C, Rebai M, Arcidiacono L, Previtali E, Gorini G, Frost CD (2018) Measurement of the neutron flux at spallation sources using multi-foil activation. Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section A: Accelerators. Spectrometers, Detectors and Associated Equipment

35.

Tietze H, Schmidt W, Geick R (1989) Rotax, a spectrometer for coherent neutron inelastic scattering at ISIS. Phys B: Condens Matter 156:550CrossRef

36.

Oliveira D, Pilla L, DeBardeleben N, Blanchard S, Quinn H, Koren I, Navaux P, Rech P (2017) Experimental and Analytical Study of Xeon Phi Reliability. In: Proceedings of the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (ACM, New York, NY, USA), SC’17, pp 28:1–28:12. https://doi.org/10.1145/3126908.3126960

37.

Oliveira D, Pilla L, Hanzich M, Fratin V, Fernandes F, Lunardi C, Cela J, Navaux P, Carro L, Rech P (2017) Radiation-induced error criticality in modern HPC parallel accelerators. In: Proceedings of 21st IEEE Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA) (ACM)

38.

Constantinescu C (2008) Intermittent faults and effects on reliability of integrated circuits. In: Reliability and Maintainability Symposium, 2008. RAMS 2008. Annual. IEEE (IEEE, Las Vegas, NV, USA), pp 370–374

39.

Quinn H, Graham P, Fairbanks T (2010) SEEs induced by high-energy protons and neutrons in SDRAM. In: 2011 IEEE Radiation Effects Data Workshop, pp 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1109/REDW.2010.6062524

40.

Srour JR, Marshall CJ, Marshall PW (2003) Review of displacement damage effects in silicon devices. IEEE Trans Nucl Sci 50(3):653. https://doi.org/10.1109/TNS.2003.813197CrossRef

41.

Association EI et al (1996) Test procedures for the measurement of single-event effects in semiconductor devices from heavy ion irradiation. EIA/JEDEC Standard (57)

42.

Constantinescu C (2002) Impact of deep submicron technology on dependability of VLSI circuits. In: IEEE Proceedings of the International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, 2002 DSN 2002. IEEE, Washington, DC, USA, pp 205–209

43.

Sridharan V, Stearley J, DeBardeleben N, Blanchard S, Gurumurthi S (2013) Feng shui of supercomputer memory: positional effects in DRAM and SRAM faults. In: Proceedings of SC13: International Conference for High Performance Computing. Storage and Analysis. ACM, Networking, p 22

44.

Guertin SM, Cui M (2017) SEE test results for the snapdragon 820. In: 2017 IEEE Radiation Effects Data Workshop (REDW), pp 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1109/NSREC.2017.8115452

45.

Sridharan V, Liberty D (2012) A study of DRAM failures in the field. In: 2012 International Conference for (IEEE) High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC), pp 1–11

46.

Fratin V, Oliveira D, Lunardi C, Santos F, Rodrigues G, Rech P (2018) Code-dependent and architecture-dependent reliability behaviors. In: 2018 48th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN). IEEE (IEEE), pp 13–26

47.

dos Santos FF, Pimenta PF, Lunardi C, Draghetti L, Carro L, Kaeli D, Rech P (2019) Analyzing and increasing the reliability of convolutional neural networks on GPUs. IEEE Trans Reliab 68(2):663. https://doi.org/10.1109/TR.2018.2878387CrossRef

48.

Jeon H, Wilkening M, Sridharan V, Gurumurthi S, Loh GH (2013) Architectural vulnerability modeling and analysis of integrated graphics processors In: IEEE 10th Workshop on Silicon Errors in Logic—System Effects (SELSE) (IEEE)

49.

Dodd PE (2005) Physics-based simulation of single-event effects. IEEE Trans Device Mater Reliab 5(3):343. https://doi.org/10.1109/TDMR.2005.855826CrossRef

50.

Soft-error testing resource (2006). http://www.seutest.com/cgi-bin/FluxCalculator.cgi

51.

Werner CJ et al (2018) mcnp6.2 release notes

52.

Leo WR (2012) Techniques for nuclear and particle physics experiments: a how-to approach. Springer, Berlin

Title: Thermal neutrons: a possible threat for supercomputer reliability
Publication date: 23-05-2020
Published in: The Journal of Supercomputing / Issue 2/2021
Print ISSN: 0920-8542
Electronic ISSN: 1573-0484
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-020-03324-9

Springer Professional

Abstract

Please log in to get access to your license.

Dont have a licence yet? Then find out more about our products and how to get one now:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Springer Professional "Technik"

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Other articles of this Issue 2/2021

Parallelized path-based search for constraint satisfaction in autonomous cognitive agents

A dynamic priority strategy for IoV data scheduling towards key data

Optimal business process deployment cost in cloud resources

An adaptive failure recovery mechanism based on asymmetric routing for data center networks

A lightweight remote user authentication scheme for IoT communication using elliptic curve cryptography

Neighborhood search-based job scheduling for IoT big data real-time processing in distributed edge-cloud computing environment

Premium Partner