Too Much Gold Delays World's Fastest Supercomputer

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."

Which is another way of saying not enough lead.

[Anonymous Coward]

ROHS strikes again

Re:can someone please explain

[ebno-10db]

What's strange is how the gold got mixed into the solder. Long gone are the days of cheap gold when they would plate every metallic surface on a connector. Now they selectively plate the mating surfaces. Certainly they don't plate the part you solder. Gold contamination of solder is a well known phenomenon, but I haven't heard of it in decades, literally. The only other thing I can figure is that sometimes they flash plate some gold on the PC board to reduce solder whiskers or something. But that's a well known process. What the hell happened here?