Self-Repairing Computers

Roland Piquepaille writes "Our computers are probably 10,000 times faster than they were twenty years ago. But operating them is much more complex. You all have experienced a PC crash or the disappearance of a large Internet site. What to do to improve the situation? This Scientific American article describes a new method called recovery-oriented computing (ROC). ROC is based on four principles: speedy recovery by using what these researchers call micro-rebooting; using better tools to pinpoint problems in multicomponent systems; build an "undo" function (similar to those in word-processing programs) for large computing systems; and injecting test errors to better evaluate systems and train operators. Check this column for more details or read the long and dense original article if you want to know more."

Comments

LOL

[gazbo]

Well said. I love jokes like this because they're so original - if you can see a joke coming a mile off then it's just not as good.

Respect.

Borg

[Anonymous Coward]

Ensign: Captain, the borg seem to be repairing themselves.
Picard: Increase to warp factor 9.3
Ensign: The cube has damaged our warp drive. We can only go warp 8.7.
Data: The borg cube will overtake us in 27 seconds. We could use an inverse tachyon beam to repair our engines and disable the borg's warp drive.
Picard: No, you almost screwed up the galaxy last time you tried that.
CleverNickName: There's this article on slashdot about self repairing computers in our archives. Maybe we can apply it to our 24th century technology to fix the warp core.
Picard: Who are you?
CleverNickName: It's me, Wesley!
Picard: Didn't you run off with the galactic pedophile?
CleverNickName: Yes, but I came back, with a bunch of new infor---
Picard: Fuck Off! Mr. Data, initialize inverse tachyon beam.

Not going to work

[locarecords.com]

This is pie in the sky.

My experience is the best system is paired computers running in parallel that are balanced by another computer that watches for problems and switches the crashed system from Live to the other computer seamlessly. It then reboots the system with problems and allows it to recreate its dataset from its partner.

In effect this points the way to the importance of massive parallelism required for totally stable systems so that clusters form the virtual computer and we get away from the idea of a computer as a single machine.

Afterall individual computers suffer hardware failure too!