Too Much Gold Delays World's Fastest Supercomputer 111
Nerval's Lobster writes "The fastest supercomputer in the world, Oak Ridge National Laboratory's 'Titan,' has been delayed because an excess of gold on its motherboard connectors has prevented it from working properly. Titan was originally turned on last October and climbed to the top of the Top500 list of the fastest supercomputers shortly thereafter. Problems with Titan were first discovered in February, when the supercomputer just missed its stability requirement. At that time, the problems with the connectors were isolated as the culprit, and ORNL decided to take some of Titan's 200 cabinets offline and ship their motherboards back to the manufacturer, Cray, for repairs. The connectors affected the ability of the GPUs in the system to talk to the main processors. Oak Ridge Today's John Huotari noted the problem was due to too much gold mixed in with the solder."
Wish (Score:4, Insightful)
I wish I had this problem in my life... too much gold!
Did anyone else go right here? [youtube.com]
Re:Wish (Score:5, Insightful)
No you don't.
Midas
Re:can someone please explain (Score:0, Insightful)
So using tin instead of lead is the real culprit, not using to much gold....
Re:Which is another way of saying not enough lead. (Score:4, Insightful)
Mod Parent up!
If I ever get my hands on the guy who had this crazy idea of taking lead out of solder... Huge mistake, even with the environmental issues... /P?
Re:Which is another way of saying not enough lead. (Score:2, Insightful)
but almost everything, medical, industrial, military, aviation, aerospace etc. basically everything that _just have to work_ is exempt
there's a reason for that
Re:Which is another way of saying not enough lead. (Score:5, Insightful)
...except that the report [semlab.com] linked from the article examines the problem of gold embrittlement of the tin-lead (63% Sn - 37% Pb) alloy. go figure.
Re:Which is another way of saying not enough lead. (Score:5, Insightful)
The lead-free solder has cost billions in failures.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisker_(metallurgy) [wikipedia.org] http://nepp.nasa.gov/WHISKER/ [nasa.gov]
NASA lost satellites because of lead-free solder (despite them requesting leaded solder). The funny thing is, leaded solder completely prevents whisker formation.
Now, you may not care about whiskers if you just throw away your electronics every year or two, but if you want longevity, these things will kill you. So for lead-free solder preventing pollution? We are producing much more garbage now thanks to whisker-caused short circuit failures.
I agree with everything except the part where that has something to do with gold contamination in solder joints.