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One of the first things you'll learn when studying experimental physics is how to come up with all kinds of alternative mechanisms that might explain the result
by ThePhysicist 5y ago
One of the first things you'll learn when studying experimental physics is how to come up with all kinds of alternative mechanisms that might explain the result you've observed in your experiment, and then think of ways to test that the results weren't actually caused by those unwanted mechanisms. Most Nobel-prize winning physics experiments were carefully designed to compensate for any relevant secondary effects, and I would even go as far as saying that this is often the largest challenge when doing high-precision experiments.
So the first question I'd ask myself when thinking about cosmic-ray induced errors is how I would ensure that the bit flips are not caused by e.g. problems on the hard drives or the NAND array (which are probably much more likely to occur than cosmic ray events, at least on the surface of the earth).
- mherdeg 5y agoYeah that was one of the gotchas in the story at https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/post/attack-of-the-cosmic-rays https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/post/attack-of-the-cosmic-ray... -- MAYBE it was a bit flip due to a cosmic ray, or MAYBE it was a bit flip due to another layer of the system that makes RAM chips store and retrieve data. I like the idea of a physicist who thinks about this and says - "well, why should we shrug and say 'maybe it was a cosmic ray?' Surely we can test this! Let's put the computer in a lead-lined enclosure and benchmark the memory failure rate and see if it changes", or whatever. That's a great extension of the classic computer-hacker view that "of course we can understand why this bug happened, we don't have to shrug and say it segfaults until we restart sometimes, we can just dig some more." How far can you go?