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Comment by blackflame7000 | Hacker News Reader

Altitude also plays a factor in random memory corruption.

From the wikipedia article on ECC Ram, "Hence, the error rates increase rapidly with rising altitude; for example, compared to the sea level, the rate of neutron flux is 3.5 times higher at 1.5 km and 300 times higher at 10–12 km (the cruising altitude of commercial airplanes).[3] As a result, systems operating at high altitudes require special provision for reliability."

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Data centres near Amsterdam are below sea level, which has been known to worry some of their foreign customers. They should just start advertising that as ECC error resistant :-)

so Numpy feature request: airplane mode

I wonder if this has anything to do with Microsoft's plans to build an underwater data center.

If I remember correctly, that research venture was mostly due to the potential of easy heat exchange and "free" energy via geothermal/tidal. Now that you mention this, though, it's clear that such a datacenter would also be naturally shielded from many things!

Can adequate shielding help?

Shielding against high-energy radiation is heavy, no matter what you use. The tenth-thickness (ie, the thickness to attenuate the radiation flux by a factor of 10) of lead is 2 inches. For water and other light materials, its about a foot. Commercial power reactors use lots of concrete, just because its cheaper to make, form, etc.

So to go from "rare" to "almost never" you need maybe three or four tenth-thicknesses of shielding material. That's an impractical amount of mass to suspend around your datacenter (rack isles, whatever).

Remember too, that you've already got ~30 feet of water equivalent in shielding (the atmosphere).

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