[NCLUG] Re: parallel processing users?

Chad Perrin perrin at apotheon.com
Tue Oct 18 08:50:20 MDT 2005


On Mon, Oct 17, 2005 at 05:39:02PM -0600, John L. Bass wrote:
> 
> If the data involved is at all critical (financial or other high value hard
> to replace/correct), then you need to start thinking about SEU's caused by
> neutron strikes. The probability is relatively low for single machines, but
> grows quickly as you add lots of machines and lots of memory to the cluster.
> 
> Machines that do not have CPU's, caches, memory and disk subsystems protected
> by parity/ecc are at risk of silent data corruption that becomes nearly impossible
> to track after the fact. Clusters of machines which lack complete parity/ecc
> protection are open to random data corruption, especially at this altitude.
> 
> Most note books, and the vast majority of comodity PC's lack this protection.

That's . . . really weird.  Thank you for the information.  I'll
definitely keep that in mind as I start looking at new systems we'll be
acquiring in the future.

-- 
Chad Perrin [ CCD CopyWrite | http://ccd.apotheon.org ]

unix virus: If you're using a unixlike OS, please forward
this to 20 others and erase your system partition.



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