Google: Computer memory flakier than expected
Wondering why your computer just crashed again? Its memory might be to blame, according to real-world Google research that finds error rates higher than what earlier work showed. With hundreds of thousands of computers in its data centers, Google can collect an abundance of real-world data about how those machines actually work. That’s exactly what the company did for a research paper that found error rates are surprisingly high.
“We found the incidence of memory errors and the range of error rates across different DIMMs (dual in-line memory modules) to be much higher than previously reported,” according the paper jointly written by Bianca Schroeder, a professor at the University of Toronto, and Google’s Eduardo Pinheiro and Wolf-Dietrich Weber. “Memory errors are not rare events.” How many errors? On average, about one in three Google servers experienced a correctable memory error each year and one in a hundred an uncorrectable error, an event that typically causes a crash.
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