A typical supercomputer workload will fail overall if any one of its hundreds or thousands of workers fail.
HPC applications were driving software checkpointing. If a job runs for days, it's not all that unlikely that one of hundreds of machines fails. Simultaneously, re-running a large job, is fairly costly on such a system.
Now, while that exists, I don't know how typical this is actually used. In my own, very limited, experience, it wasn't and job-failures due to hardware failure were rare. But then, the cluster(s) I tended to were much smaller, up to some 100 nodes each.
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HPC applications were driving software checkpointing. If a job runs for days, it's not all that unlikely that one of hundreds of machines fails. Simultaneously, re-running a large job, is fairly costly on such a system.
Now, while that exists, I don't know how typical this is actually used. In my own, very limited, experience, it wasn't and job-failures due to hardware failure were rare. But then, the cluster(s) I tended to were much smaller, up to some 100 nodes each.