Okay before we get going with the same discussion about ECC vs. Non ECC, and all the flames start from people perusing slashdot who think they are more in the know than the PhD's at VT who have been working on this for months I want to point a few things out.
1. The majority if not all of the bit errors that ECC corrects are caused by thermal noise. Thermal noise is an issue in a cluster of rack mounted 1U units due to the difficulty of cooling such tightly spaced units generating so much heat in so small a space. It is not an issue in a cluster of DESKTOP machines utilizing a Liebert system with way more cooling capacity than is needed.
2. Even if somehow a none-thermal bit error occurs, each node has 4GB RAM. The probability of it being in an OS or application critical (especially given the converging nature of many long running calculations) piece of RAM as opposed to an empty piece of RAM is small.
How many of you are reading this from a desktop without ECC RAM that has an obnoxiously huge uptime? ECC is a non-issue in a well-cooled cluster of desktop cased machines.
