What Is Burn-In Testing?_
Burn-in testing runs GPU hardware at sustained high load for an extended period (typically 24–72 hours) after initial deployment to identify early failures (infant mortality). Burn-in stresses power delivery, cooling, memory, and interconnects simultaneously. Components that survive burn-in are statistically far less likely to fail in production. Leviathan performs burn-in as part of the commissioning process.
Technical Details
Burn-in testing exploits the bathtub curve of component failure rates: most hardware failures occur either very early (infant mortality) or very late (wear-out) in a component's life. By running hardware at sustained high stress immediately after deployment, burn-in forces infant mortality failures to manifest before the system enters production. GPU burn-in typically involves running compute-intensive workloads (GEMM benchmarks, stress tests) at maximum GPU utilization for 24–72 hours while monitoring GPU temperatures and thermal throttling, memory error rates (correctable and uncorrectable ECC errors), power consumption stability, network link error counters, and cooling system performance (flow rates, delta-T). Any anomaly during burn-in triggers investigation and remediation before handoff.
How Leviathan Systems Works with Burn-In Testing
Leviathan Systems performs burn-in testing as the final step in our commissioning process, running sustained stress tests on deployed GPU infrastructure and documenting results before handing off to the operations team.