Validation of the fault/error handling mechanisms of the Teraflops supercomputer

The Teraflops system, the world's most powerful supercomputer, was developed by Intel Corporation for the US Department of Energy (DOE) as part of the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI). The machine contains more than 9000 Intel Pentium (R) Pro processors and performs over one trillion floating point operations per second. Complex hardware and software mechanisms were devised for complying with DOE's reliability requirements. This paper gives a brief description of the Teraflops system architecture and presents the validation of the fault/error handling mechanisms. The validation process was based on an enhanced version of the physical fault injection at the IC pin level. An original approach was developed for assessing signal sensitivity to transient faults and the effectiveness of the fault tolerance mechanisms. Several malfunctions were unveiled by the fault injection experiments. After corrective actions had been undertaken, the supercomputer performed according to the specification.