Estimating Reliability Trends for the World ' s Fastest Computer

Los Alarnos National Laboratory is home to the World’s fastest computer-Blue Mountain. This machine was created by parallelizing “desktop” computers, To determine whether or not this type of architecture represents the future of super-computing, reliability must be estimated. This paper presents and analyzes failure data of Blue Mountain. Non-homogeneous Poisson processes are fit to the data within a Bayesian hierarchical framework. The task of selecting hyperparameters is discussed, and Bayes factors are used to compare models.

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