| |||||||||||||
NSEU on the hypervisor?NSEU on the hypervisor?Posted Sep 19, 2013 2:07 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313)In reply to: NSEU on the hypervisor? by pflugstad Parent article: Asteroid "mining" with Linux and FOSS
They are planning to send redundant hardware, that's how they will be able to survive and recover from radiation induced errors.
But, 3 $1K processors are still cheaper than 1 $200K processor, not to mention faster.
Now, they may discover that NASA is right and you really need a space rated processor to keep going
Or they may find that a little bit of redundancy and shielding lets them get by for a fraction of what a NASA mission would need, and have a lot more performance available as well.
(Log in to post comments)
NSEU on the hypervisor? Posted Sep 19, 2013 5:08 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Unfortunately, shielding doesn't really help against cosmic rays. They are just too high-energetic. It helps against fairly slow-energy particles trapped in radiation belts, though.
Radiation hardening Posted Sep 19, 2013 8:51 UTC (Thu) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link]
I actually found the wikipedia article on this quite informative:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hardening
Essentially you have two kinds of damage. Actual physical irreversible damage which degrades your chips over a long period. And transient spikes which can cause problems. The latter can sometimes be fixed by turning it off and on, but that seems a little difficult if you're doing it on one chip with VMs.
Still, given the price difference you can play the odds. If for the same price you can send up 100 of these things and a dozen fail you're still way ahead (except, perhaps, for the space junk).
Radiation hardening Posted Sep 27, 2013 15:39 UTC (Fri) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link]
The other to bear in mind is the steady shrinkage in the size of the die. What you really want is a last-generation processor made using this-generation fabrication.
Let's assume a particle strike causes a 5nm "area of destruction". Do you want that hitting a track that's 10nm wide, or 30nm wide?
In other words, based purely on physical component size, older hardware will be more robust.
Cheers,
NSEU on the hypervisor? Posted Sep 19, 2013 14:21 UTC (Thu) by cate (subscriber, #1359) [Link]
BTW it is the same method (triple hardware instead of radiation-resistant-hardware) used successfully by SpaceX Dragons (see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_(spacecraft)#Radiation_tolerance)
|
|||||||||||||