ihaque - Slashdot User

Submission + - Two-thirds of NVIDIA GPUs show memory errors (arxiv.org)

Submitted by entee on Tuesday October 13, 2009 @01:47PM

entee writes: Researchers at Stanford tested over 20,000 NVIDIA GPUs around the world using the Folding@home distributed computing platform, and found that a substantial number of NVIDIA GPUs exhibit "soft" memory error. Even after applying a crude correction for computing errors, as many as two-thirds of graphics cards were found to "forget". The paper claims this is a problem in all existing NVIDIA GPUs: "G80 and GT200 are both vulnerable to a nonzero per-transaction error rate in memory accesses", and that it is likely true of boards from all GPU manufacturers. This study comes on the heels of Google's recently reported "hard" memory error rates in its server farms. Given the rapidly swelling number of GPUs user for scientific computing applications, perhaps this result explains why NVIDIA plans to introduce ECC into its next generation hardware.

Comment Re:wow (Score 4, Insightful) 1106

by ihaque on Monday December 24, 2007 @01:32PM (#21807370) Attached to: US To Extinguish (Most) Incandescent Bulb Sales By 2012

FACT: Fluorescent bulbs lead to poorer health in humans because of a lack of vitamin D production. In addition to hurting humans, this also makes them wholly unacceptable for use in animal cages because many animals (particularly reptiles) really need this....

I really hope your incandescent bulbs aren't causing your body to produce a lot of vitamin D, because that "biochemical reaction" is triggered by UVB radiation. Incandescent lights won't produce much of that unless they're running really hot (like halogens) - and those need to have a UV blocker on them to keep them from giving you sunburns.

FACT: Fluorescent bulbs contain toxic chemicals that are far worse for the environment than all the belching coal smoke from power generation.

This is a common canard from the anti-CFL crowd that has repeatedly been shown to be false. Calculation demonstrates that even if no CFLs are recycled, you still drop less mercury into the environment, from the reduced amount of mercury put into the air by burning coal:

FACT: The people who are really pushing CFLs are not the environmentalists (except a few sheep). The people who are really pushing it are the power companies because after years of mismanaging the power grids and failing to upgrade them to accommodate growing energy needs, they have run themselves into a brick wall.

Oh really? That really needs some evidence before we can take it as a "FACT".

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