[Beowulf] Curious about ECC vs non-ECC in practice

David Mathog mathog at caltech.edu
Tue May 24 11:37:30 PDT 2011


Jim Lux posted:

> "The Therac-25 Accidents" (Postscript ) or (PDF). This paper is an
updated version of the original IEEE Computer (July 1993) article. It
also appears in the appendix of my book.

Well that was really horrible. 

Are car computers ECC?  When all they did was engine management a memory
glitch wouldn't have been too terrible, but now that some of them
control automatic parking and other "higher" functions, and with around
100M units in circulation just in the USA, if they aren't ECC then
memory glitches in running vehicles would have to be happening every day.

David Mathog
mathog at caltech.edu
Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech



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