My dad's been bitching about ASCI Q for over 10 years. The article is oddly present-tense; experiences with ASCI-Q and whatever the livermore machine were basically pushed the labs out of supercomputers and into distributed computing. Not mentioned in the article is LANL's solution - kill any processor that errors out. Throughout its history, ASCI-Q usually ran with about 20% of its chips offline. Effectively, they turned their giant box into a network.

It has also been suggested that LANL had to be more pragmatic than Livermore because, at 7200 feet, it had a lot more cosmic rays to deal with.