Do Solar Proton Events Reduce the Number of Faults in Supercomputers?: A Comparative Analysis of Faults During and without Solar Proton Events

Cosmic rays causing faults on computers is well-established within the reliability community. However, during Solar Proton Events (SPEs), the Earth's magnetic field compresses, which can shield the Earth from the effects of cosmic rays. In our paper, we use a statistical analysis to quantitatively assess if differing flux levels from SPEs lead to significant changes in the number of faults observed on Cielo, a supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory. From our analysis, we found that as flux levels increase during SPEs, there is an overall decrease in the number of faults on Cielo. Better understanding about how SPEs affect fault rates allows the high performance computing reliability community to more accurately compare cosmic ray induced faults from different time periods.