2019 Physics/Theoretical Colloquium Thursday, October 31st , 2019 3:45 – 4:45 p.m. Rosen Auditorium (TA-53, Bldg. 001) Refreshments at 3:15pm Speaker: Assoc. Prof. Paolo Rech Assoc. Professor at UFRGS in Brazil 2019 Rosen Scholar Fellow at the Los Alamos National Laboratory “Reliability in the Era of Autonomous Vehicles and Supercomputers” Abstract: Reliability is one of the major concerns for both safety-critical and High-Performance Computing applications. A neutron impact can generate faults in computing devices, leading to application crashes, wrong results, and system hangs. Several evidences showed that neutron-induced faults have corrupted large-server operations, have caused unexpected behaviors in airplanes, lead to car accidents ... and have even influenced politics results. In the talk we will briefly cover the effects of neutron impact on computing systems and applications. Particular emphasis will be given to self-driven cars, which is the newest trend in the automotive industry. We will present the results of several experiments on object-detection frameworks for automotive applications and show that neutrons can effectively change the way a vehicle senses objects, potentially leading to accidents. Lately, novel architectural solutions, such as heterogeneous computing and mixed-precision architectures, have been introduced to increase devices computational efficiency. We will discuss if and how we can take advantage of these novel architectural solutions to improve applications reliability without unnecessary overhead. Particular attention will be given to the reliability of Xilinx Field-Programmable Gate-Arrays (FPGA), Intel Xeon Phis, NVIDIA Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), ARM embedded devices, and AMD heterogeneous devices. Bio: Paolo Rech received his master and Ph.D. degrees from Padova University, Padova, Italy, in 2006 and 2009, respectively. He was then a Post Doc at LIRMM in Montpellier, France. Since 2012 Paolo is an associate professor at UFRGS in Brazil and he is the 2019 Rosen Scholar Fellow at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. His main research interests include the evaluation and mitigation of radiation-induced effects in large-scale HPC centers and in autonomous vehicles for automotive applications and space explorations.