4 ms·
IBM estimated in the '90s that an average desktop computer experienced soft-errors from cosmic rays (energetic neutrons striking a memory cell or data bus, pert
by msbarnett 11y ago
IBM estimated in the '90s that an average desktop computer experienced soft-errors from cosmic rays (energetic neutrons striking a memory cell or data bus, perturbing it enough to flip a bit) at a rate of 1 incident/per 256 Megs of RAM/per month
- sosuke 11y agoI want to know more that sounds awesome: Was this it? http://domino.research.ibm.com/tchjr/journalindex.nsf/0b9bc46ed06cbac1852565e6006fe1a0/922f6bbd8495db1485256bfa0067fc4e!OpenDocument http://domino.research.ibm.com/tchjr/journalindex.nsf/0b9bc4... http://www.ida.liu.se/labs/eslab/SNDFT/docs/IBMdram.pdf http://www.ida.liu.se/labs/eslab/SNDFT/docs/IBMdram.pdf "This clearly indicates that because of cosmic rays, for every 256 Mbytes of memory, you'll get one soft error a month," said Tim Dell, senior design engineer for IBM Microelectronics. "The same phenomenon for hard errors with multiple bits will also come into effect with soft errors."
- semi-extrinsic 11y agoCosmic rays are a big problem for supercomputers. There was a very interesting piece [1] on it in Spectrum recently. One of the funniest anecdotes was about a DEC AlphaServers machine installed at Los Alamos, where they had to put a running server blade inside a neutron beam and confirm the error rates spiked in order to convince the manufacturer that the machines were improperly shielded. [1] 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...