14 DAY TRIAL // Gold has been noted to possess better electrical conductivity than other substances, which is why it is a big deal when, say, a USB port has gold connectors.
It so happens that there can be too much of it, as the folks at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory have just learned.
Last year, ORNL's Titan supercomputer was named the fastest ever by the Top500 list.
It turns out that the pronouncement may have been premature, something not completely shocking seeing as how the acceptance testing was never formally conducted.
Had it been, they might have realized that the system was too unstable to run at full power because of the gold connectors on the exotic motherboards, Slashdot reports.
The ability of the GPU to communicate with the main processors is hampered by all the gold mixed with the solder to create the connections. They are brittle and liable to falling off apparently.
Cray is currently fixing the mainboards, and new components should be ready by April. Only afterwards will Titan run to its fullest ability.