Re: [TUHS] How to do differential/integral on a PDP-7, was: Space Travel

[Kurt H Maier <khm@sciops.net>]

On Mon, Oct 21, 2019 at 03:21:34PM -0400, Paul Winalski wrote:
>
> I'm much more alarmed by the lack of memory error detection and
> correction on a lot of modern computers.  This is one of my big
> concerns with the use of GPUs for heavy-duty computation.  GPUs
> typically don't have memory with error detection because the worst
> that happens if there's a memory error in the GPU is you get a bad
> pixel or two displayed.  I'd not like to cross a bridge whose design
> software used CUDA.
>
       
This might be true of gaming cards and low-end workstation cards, but   
the higher-end Quadro cards and all the dedicated GPGPUs have had at    
least ECC since at least the Maxwell era.  Of course, nobody does a     
single run and stamps the drawings, so the process itself should catch  
these problems, but any correctly-configured CAD workstation or compute
cluster has error-correcting memory, both on the system and in the
accelerators.  AMD's Radeon Pro and Intel's Xeon Phi accelerators do
ECC as well.

khm