Intel to protect humanity from cosmic rays
IT SEEMS THAT the boffins at Intel have been reading one too many comic books lately, as they have just announced heroic plans to protect humanity from the dangers of cosmic rays. Yes, cosmic rays. The company says it will develop on-chip cosmic ray detectors, which will be able to counter the evil effects of the space particles before any real damage is done.
Cosmic rays are actually not really rays at all, just plain old energetic particles from outer space that occasionally feel the urge to come tearing through the Earth's atmosphere to cause random chaos. About 90 per cent of them are protons, another nine per cent are helium nuclei (or alpha particles) and about one per cent of the little blighters are electrons (or beta minus particles).
They tend to be fairly innocuous, quiet little particles on the whole, but Intel thinks otherwise. Basically, because semiconductors rely on charged particles, unexpected ray hits could disrupt systems and cause them to crash. Apparently in quite boring, anticlimactic fashion, as opposed to the bright flashes of white light and fluorescent orange mushroom clouds one has come to expect from sci-fi cosmic rays.
But Intel has donned its red cape and tights anyway, because, as Intel's senior scientist, Eric Hannah, told the BBC “if a cosmic ray causes a collision inside the silicon chip, that releases lots of charged particles". Scary stuff indeed. Admittedly, the cosmic rays wouldn’t cause too much hassle for just one lone computer with a single chip, but they could end up being problematic for supercomputers with 10,000 chips, potentially causing 10 to 20 faults a week.
Also, purportedly, as chips get smaller and smaller, the risk of them being interfered with by malicious cosmic rays increases due to the fact that their circuits need less charge per switch to run.
So aside from saving the world from the rare and relatively harmless computer crashes not caused by free software, you could ask yourself what exactly was the point for Intel to invent a cosmic ray detector. Well, it appears that not only computers could be affected by the problem, but anything that needs computer operated parts to run properly, including cars.
Hannah points out, "you could be going down the autobahn at 200 miles an hour [Not me, the Jag's limited to 155 - Ed] and suddenly discover your anti-lock braking system doesn't work because it had a cosmic ray event". Well, maybe cosmic rays wouldn’t be the first explanation you could come up with, but don’t discount the possibility.
But if you had an Intel cosmic ray detector installed into your car, you just might be able to escape unscathed because the detector would apparently notice if mischievous rays have been causing interference, and could tell the chip to repeat the command. Something along the lines of “you were just hit by a cosmic ray, you may want to redo that calculation”, says Hannah.
Of course, the ray detector is still some way off and is only really in the discussion phase, but Intel says it will press on and build one in the near future. After all, saving the world could mean big business. µ
L’Inq
BBC
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Camera sensors are quite often affected by "cosmic rays". In fact, according to Sony, most dead pixels in camera sensors are due to cosmic rays.
Also, commercial satellites and space instruments use very primitive chips (compared to what's new), so they won't be easily affected by cosmic rays. Some new insulation might work wonders in the field, allowing the lastest cpus on board.
After all, with Nasa prepaing a mission to mars within the next 50 years or so, ther'd better be some extra protection after all.
Phillipos, satellite detectors are certainly affected by cosmic rays, more so than on Earth because the atmosphere blocks most of them from reaching the ground. I used to work in the field - we would buy (and extensively test) rad-hard memory chips for the satellite on-board memory to prevent exactly this kind of thing. The technology has been around for a long time.
The car example is borderline ridiculous - I mean you'd expect your car electronics to be quite robust, at least the more basic and critical ones. It's not like your ABS system needs to do calculations in the teraflops range, so I see little sense in having the chips to do with that being manufactured in the 35nm process. Will serve only to make them fail (as in break up) that much quicker.

Besides, running two systems parallel and recalculating if the outputs differ would be a much better way anyway - i.e. having redundancy, rather than second-guessing some mysterious random ray effect may or may not have on the calculations.

The technology may have it's merits and uses, but I'd rather not have it confusing my ABS.
"Cosmic rays are actually not really rays at all" ? 
Kind of misleading. They are particles, and they are also waves (as described by Schrodinger's equation), and both propagate in a ray-like manner. Rays have an origin and a direction. So yes, they are actually rays.
The effects of cosmic rays are or at least were one of the main reasons for applying ECC to large DRAM arrays. Memory corruption attributed mainly to alpha particles was perceived as a serious problem in the early '80s when 64K bytes was quite a lot of RAM. Perhaps modern memory devices are less succeptible to such effects given that an ordinary PC can contain several gigabytes of DRAM and never appear to suffer from memory failure.
I mose definitely dislike this snide remark implying that free software crashes computers while proprietary software's propensity to crash goes unmentioned:

"So aside from saving the world from the rare and relatively harmless computer crashes not caused by free software, ..."

You should have omitted the word "free". All types of software cause computer crashes. I won't try to argue which kind is more liable to crashes. My objection is to the implication that free software somehow is more liable than proprietary software to cause crashes.
I have my quad core Intel pinned down by one great hunk of aluminum and copper heatsink, I would have thought it the blocks of alloy cooling modern processors would go a long way to shielding expensive silicon from all but the very highest energy particles we get at the bottom of the atmosphere. In light of this, why not just redesign existing heatsinks to be a more effective shield for high energy particles?
You could magnetize a steel pc case to improve cosmic ray shielding.
I think it shouldn't say "to protec humanity" since the article is about to protect the effects of cosmic ray to electronic chips. When i first read the title I was like "when did intel enter the health business?"
Cosmic rays may come in batches, I don't know, but we are told that a "cosmic ray" is basically a particle.
So, given that the ray detector is different from the processing unit that it is supposed to be "protecting", what guarantee is there that the particle that caused the detector to go off actually hit the processing unit ?
In other words, what is the use of detecting that a fault has been caused by a cosmic ray ?
Wouldn't it be better to detect that there was a fault in the first place ?
I'll protect my chips with vinegar, but all the same, will I still need to wear my aluminium foil anti-positron cap? You see what's on my mind! Dissemble no more!