Kind of a fun ancedote: In "the old days" when you'd run a server room in your office we had a very large HPC cluster + a significant amount of storage and other one off servers on the top floor of a mid rise office building. I eventually moved it all to a former nuclear fallout facility where our systems were three floors down and under a gigantic pool of water. Error rates and random crashes fell off IMMEDIATELY. I…
Sun’s UltraSPARC II CPU modules were claimed to be particularly susceptible to cosmic rays circa 2000.
Cosmic rays causing 30k network malfunctions in Japan each year
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Re: Cosmic rays causing 30k network malfunctions in Japan each year
#72This reminds me of Bitsquatting, which is like typosquatting but uses domains one bit-flip away instead of one mistyped letter away.[0] In a small experiment, for some popular domains, the author reportedly got a lot of hits.
In the associated DEFCON talk, the author notes that even if you use ECC memory, it's unlikely that the DRAM in your hard drives does too.[1]
Re: Cosmic rays causing 30k network malfunctions in Japan each year
#73They have to do two things :-) 1) Use ECC memory 2) Go underground "One experiment measured the soft error rate at the sea level to be 5,950 failures in time (FIT = failures per billion hours) per DRAM chip. When the same test setup was moved to an underground vault, shielded by over 50 feet (15 m) of rock that effectively eliminated all cosmic rays, zero soft errors were recorded.[6] In this test, all other causes o…
A 'Faraday Cage' should also help. edit: No idea why the downvotes. Faraday cages have long been thought of as a way to protect electrical devices from the electromagnetic waves which can be a result of solar flares. I even chatted to someone from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory about it in the past.
Cosmic rays are not electromagnetic waves. They are highly energetic particles, like protons and naked helium nuclei.
Re: Cosmic rays causing 30k network malfunctions in Japan each year
#74Kind of a fun ancedote: In "the old days" when you'd run a server room in your office we had a very large HPC cluster + a significant amount of storage and other one off servers on the top floor of a mid rise office building. I eventually moved it all to a former nuclear fallout facility where our systems were three floors down and under a gigantic pool of water. Error rates and random crashes fell off IMMEDIATELY. I…
Awesome. Next time clients call about their services being down I am totally using this one.
Re: Cosmic rays causing 30k network malfunctions in Japan each year
#75Is appeal to cosmic rays a candidate for an engineering logical fallacy?
Re: Cosmic rays causing 30k network malfunctions in Japan each year
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
seems too low-level, no? the temporary excitation of a single neuron would most likely just fade away into the equilibrating process of the brain
>In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect
Is there reason to believe the brain is chaotic on that level? The reason I doubt it because any stable biological system has as one of its primary tasks - if not its #1 primary task - to maintain equilibrium. Otherwise it would collapse into chaos due to the inherent imprecision of molecular phenomena. So I would be very surprised if you could stimulate a neuron - not even a neuron, but an electron inside a neuron - and cause something as complex as an idea to form. More likely it would be equilibrated away
Re: Cosmic rays causing 30k network malfunctions in Japan each year
#77Kind of a fun ancedote: In "the old days" when you'd run a server room in your office we had a very large HPC cluster + a significant amount of storage and other one off servers on the top floor of a mid rise office building. I eventually moved it all to a former nuclear fallout facility where our systems were three floors down and under a gigantic pool of water. Error rates and random crashes fell off IMMEDIATELY. I…
I have no experience with tracking this kind of thing. How do you do it, what kind of analytics/tracking program is used, etc.?
Re: Cosmic rays causing 30k network malfunctions in Japan each year
#78Kind of a fun ancedote: In "the old days" when you'd run a server room in your office we had a very large HPC cluster + a significant amount of storage and other one off servers on the top floor of a mid rise office building. I eventually moved it all to a former nuclear fallout facility where our systems were three floors down and under a gigantic pool of water. Error rates and random crashes fell off IMMEDIATELY. I…
Wonderful. Yet another reason for the IT office to be relegated to a sub-basement.
Re: Cosmic rays causing 30k network malfunctions in Japan each year
#79Kind of a fun ancedote: In "the old days" when you'd run a server room in your office we had a very large HPC cluster + a significant amount of storage and other one off servers on the top floor of a mid rise office building. I eventually moved it all to a former nuclear fallout facility where our systems were three floors down and under a gigantic pool of water. Error rates and random crashes fell off IMMEDIATELY. I…
Wonderful. Yet another reason for the IT office to be relegated to a sub-basement.
Why the whole IT office? Just the hardware running the software, not the humans who develop it.
Re: Cosmic rays causing 30k network malfunctions in Japan each year
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wonderful. Yet another reason for the IT office to be relegated to a sub-basement.
Why the whole IT office? Just the hardware running the software, not the humans who develop it.
Most offices/businesses have nothing to do with software development. Most IT shop are in basements, or at least on lower levels near the core servers and other infrastructure they manage. "The IT Crowd" was a stereotype but was still based on the reality of most businesses. I have never seen or even heard of an IT shop with a skylight. Even windows are rare.