5 ms·
Another place this use case comes up is supercomputing. Not because of the unusual levels of radioactivity, but because of unusual numbers of processors. When
by tgamblin 10y ago
Another place this use case comes up is supercomputing. Not because of the unusual levels of radioactivity, but because of unusual numbers of processors. When you have more components, a single bit flip somewhere is increasingly likely. Resilience has been a research area in HPC for a while now, and people have looked at fault tolerant algorithms, redundancy schemes, faster checkpointing, and other ways to make sure your HPC application running on a million cores won't die because one core gets a bit flip.
So far this has luckily remained a research area in practice, because the vendors tend to do a good job of hardening their machines against errors as they get larger (most of the gloom and doom predictions take the error rates of current hardware and extrapolate). It will be interesting to see if it remains that way.
Relevant article: http://superfri.org/superfri/article/view/14 http://superfri.org/superfri/article/view/14
- ams6110 10y agoSame reason RAID-5 doesn't work on for large disks. If you have a dozen 3TB drives in an array and one dies, the probability that you'll get a read error on another drive during the rebuild is quite high. Given enough bits, random errors that individually are almost impossible become almost a certainty.
- brokenmachine 10y agoWhat level of RAID would you use for an array involving a dozen 3Tb drives? If the drives can't be trusted, then you'd need some kind of error correction in software, I'd presume. I thought the drives should auto-correct any read errors. I'm not talking about in a radioactive environment, just normal usage.
- benjaminRRR 10y agoIEEE spectrum had a nice article very recently http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/how-to-kill-a-supercomputer-dirty-power-cosmic-rays-and-bad-solder http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/how-to-kill-a-su...