4 ms·
No, but it’s straightforward engineering to prevent many of these problems. Error-correcting codes have been well understood for most of a century. Yes, it co
by brians 9y ago
No, but it’s straightforward engineering to prevent many of these problems. Error-correcting codes have been well understood for most of a century. Yes, it costs in performance and in money. For life-safety applications, it shouldn’t be optional.
Amazon is hosting life-safety applications in EC2. Commodity x86 hardware is grossly negligent for that environment.
- jchw 9y agoECC as it is today may not be sufficient. It's mostly useful against single bit flips. Probably better than nothing, though...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- brians 9y agoECC alone is absolutely insufficient. But ECC can be part of a system design that includes active monitoring and response. I’d expect that system design to also include measurement of ECC events under ordinary conditions, regular re-measurement, and funding for an analysis of the changes and explanation of the difference—just like you’d find in safety engineering in a coal plant, an MRI machine, any sort of engineering that has a professional scientist or engineer on site supervising all operations. Of course, you’ll also find a tendency there towards specified hardware. They bend or break it to use COTS x86 machines, but—as I think I heard from a comment here last week—nearly nobody ever specified wanting AMT in the initial design, so it’s pretty weird that we’re all buying and deploying it.