Does high chance of Aurora Borealis means higher chance of bit flips in RAM, SSD set?

[Supersonicwolfe]

I got an interesting question. So we all know cosmic rays may cause bit flips.

And aurora (northern lights) is basically cosmic rays hitting atmosphere...

So does higher chance of aurora meaning higher chance of bitflips?

 

I am pretty sure hard drives (if not writing) are immune to the bitflips and probably SSD too. But CPU and non-ECC RAM are susceptible to cosmic ray induced bitflips. So maybe it best not downloading anything during high aurora chance?

[m37]

1 minute ago, Supersonicwolfe said:

I got an interesting question. So we all know cosmic rays may cause bit flips.

And aurora (northern lights) is basically cosmic rays hitting atmosphere...

So does higher chance of aurora meaning higher chance of bitflips?

 

I am pretty sure hard drives (if not writing) are immune to the bitflips and probably SSD too. But CPU and non-ECC RAM are susceptible to cosmic ray induced bitflips. So maybe it best not downloading anything during high aurora chance?

dawg we aint no scientists

[Needfuldoer]

At this time of year, at this time of day, in this part of the country, localized entirely within your PC?

 

No.

 

The Earth is bombarded with solar energy all the time. It's an 11-ish year cycle, we're not suddenly getting hit by far more than has ever hit us in the past.

[Supersonicwolfe]

14 minutes ago, Needfuldoer said:

At this time of year, at this time of day, in this part of the country, localized entirely within your PC?

 

No.

 

The Earth is bombarded with solar energy all the time. It's an 11-ish year cycle, we're not suddenly getting hit by far more than has ever hit us in the past.

Well I live in the Sweden, and cosmetic particles does travel along magnetic lines and hit us... Which is why aurora only appear in polar regions...

[BobVonBob]

Don't worry about it. Unless you happen to leave Earth's magnetic field the chance of bit flips is astronomically (Ha!) small. Totally stock iPads are some of the most common computers on the International Space Station, and they don't have trouble with cosmic bit flips despite literally flying through auroras on a fairly regular basis.

[Dedayog]

"I got an interesting question. So we all know cosmic rays may cause bit flips."

 

We did?  I did not know this.

 

 

[StDragon]

Aurora Borealis occur when charged particles are moving in the direction towards the Earth and travel along the magnetic field lines to both poles.

To my knowledge (and anyone correct me if I'm wrong), cosmic / gamma rays don't follow the path of magnetic fields. So there shouldn't be any correlation between the intensity of an Aurora and rate of bitflips caused by the aforementioned rays. Those charged particles are typically low-energy whereas cosmic and gamma rays are much higher in energy levels!

 

So bitflips is a real thing, and a CPU register or gate on a DIMM flipped in the wrong place at the wrong time will cause an error. Depending on where and the data it impacts, it can corrupt data when flushing the cache back to disk upon write-back, or even cause a kernel panic (aka BSOD).

Fortunately in networking and storage, there's CRC error correction that does occur, but really depends on where and the type of data in flight that had the bit flipped. That's why for the added assurance, servers use ECC memory for extra fault-tolerance in operation.

[StDragon]

3 minutes ago, Dedayog said:

"I got an interesting question. So we all know cosmic rays may cause bit flips."

 

We did?  I did not know this.

 

 

Most people don't. But for an in-depth research on memory errors, you can visit the link below.

https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/35162.pdf

[Supersonicwolfe]

9 minutes ago, StDragon said:

Aurora Borealis occur when charged particles are moving in the direction towards the Earth and travel along the magnetic field lines to both poles.

To my knowledge (and anyone correct me if I'm wrong), cosmic / gamma rays don't follow the path of magnetic fields. So there shouldn't be any correlation between the intensity of an Aurora and rate of bitflips caused by the aforementioned rays. Those charged particles are typically low-energy whereas cosmic and gamma rays are much higher in energy levels!

 

So bitflips is a real thing, and a CPU register or gate on a DIMM flipped in the wrong place at the wrong time will cause an error. Depending on where and the data it impacts, it can corrupt data when flushing the cache back to disk upon write-back, or even cause a kernel panic (aka BSOD).

Fortunately in networking and storage, there's CRC error correction that does occur, but really depends on where and the type of data in flight that had the bit flipped. That's why for the added assurance, servers use ECC memory for extra fault-tolerance in operation.

Thanks for the information but that was what I already know. I was concerned that the charged particles hitting the atmosphere release photons (aka Aurora Borealis) can also release higher energy rays and other particles...

 

I know avionics and spaceflight equipment are so expensive because they are hardened to protect against it. While my computer is near a window with a glass side panel. Pretty much like a patient during a open heart surgery...

 

Well I wish there is a dedicated paper on the subject...

[StDragon]

13 minutes ago, Supersonicwolfe said:

I know avionics and spaceflight equipment are so expensive because they are hardened to protect against it. While my computer is near a window with a glass side panel. Pretty much like a patient during a open heart surgery...

There's also a statistical measurable increase in cancer rate among pilots and the rest of the flight crew. Officially, there's no causality, but only correlation.

The current theory is that because the atmosphere is much thinner at higher altitudes, cosmic rays strike with more occurrence. Being that it's ionizing radiation, these packets of energy strike DNA strands and shatter the chemistry bonds that hold the atoms together. Cellular repair does happen with DNA that's the equivalent of RAID1 (a pair). But depending on where and how severe along the strand the damage is, transcription errors can occur during the mitosis phase (cellular division). A damaged cell will self-destruct properly. But the cells that go on dividing uncontrollably is by nature "cancer".

 

We all get struck with ionizing radiation every day (no, WiFi or cellular doesn't count as it's the non-ionizing type). It all comes down to probabilities in how ionizing radiation cumulatively effect us.