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Serious Computer Glitches Can Be Caused By Cosmic Rays (computerworld.com)
The Los Alamos National Lab wrote in 2012 that "For over 20 years the military, the commercial aerospace industry, and the computer industry have known that high-energy neutrons streaming through our atmosphere can cause computer errors." Now an anonymous reader quotes Computerworld:
When your computer crashes or phone freezes, don't be so quick to blame the manufacturer. Cosmic rays -- or rather the electrically charged particles they generate -- may be your real foe. While harmless to living organisms, a small number of these particles have enough energy to interfere with the operation of the microelectronic circuitry in our personal devices... particles alter an individual bit of data stored in a chip's memory. Consequences can be as trivial as altering a single pixel in a photograph or as serious as bringing down a passenger jet.
A "single-event upset" was also blamed for an electronic voting error in Schaerbeekm, Belgium, back in 2003. A bit flip in the electronic voting machine added 4,096 extra votes to one candidate. The issue was noticed only because the machine gave the candidate more votes than were possible. "This is a really big problem, but it is mostly invisible to the public," said Bharat Bhuva. Bhuva is a member of Vanderbilt University's Radiation Effects Research Group, established in 1987 to study the effects of radiation on electronic systems.
Cisco has been researching cosmic radiation since 2001, and in September briefly cited cosmic rays as a possible explanation for partial data losses that customer's were experiencing with their ASR 9000 routers.
A "single-event upset" was also blamed for an electronic voting error in Schaerbeekm, Belgium, back in 2003. A bit flip in the electronic voting machine added 4,096 extra votes to one candidate. The issue was noticed only because the machine gave the candidate more votes than were possible. "This is a really big problem, but it is mostly invisible to the public," said Bharat Bhuva. Bhuva is a member of Vanderbilt University's Radiation Effects Research Group, established in 1987 to study the effects of radiation on electronic systems.
Cisco has been researching cosmic radiation since 2001, and in September briefly cited cosmic rays as a possible explanation for partial data losses that customer's were experiencing with their ASR 9000 routers.
There's something you can do about it. It's very easy, but you won't like it.
Make every component in triplicate. Everything in the CPU, everything in the RAM, everything in storage, etc. If the three aren't equal, go with the value shared by two of them and rewrite the different one with that value.
Not only is this not actually all that easy (all of your triplicate systems have to be clocked together in sync, you need a shitload of extra hardware to do the comparison, etc.) it's grossly unnecessary. Standard off-the-shelf error detection and correction can (and routinely does) handle radiation induced errors. It just costs a bit more, because it's a business-level feature. It doesn't matter if that MP3 of Taylor Swift gets mildly corrupted (might even sound better that way, zing), but it very much *does* matter if that bank account gets a flipped bit.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
I really would like to visit your house. After I eat a lot of fiber, maybe some bran muffins or flax seeds. That way I can take a great big SHIT and put a very large, moist turd in your microwave. You will just LOVE what happens when it's in there on high for about ten minutes!
You need to have a better diet. Healthy shit has the consistency of toothpaste.
It makes for an interesting conversation piece.
I had a roommate who left a squash inside a toaster oven on low heat overnight. The squash was carbonized all the way through. Charred on the outside, charred on the inside. Now that was a conversation piece.
Read this paper. He postulates 2 soft errors per year for a Xeon 7500 with 24 MB L3 cache at sea level in New York City. He also gives figures for static RAM, which is the stuff of CPU registers.
Bruce Perens.