The computer that can’t crash | Hacker News Reader

The computer that can’t crash

humansinvent.com

16 pointsleojkent15 comments

So that’s why, if one of them locks up or freezes, your whole computer can crash because it’s not actually doing things in parallel.

What utter BS. Does this guy know nothing about privilege levels [1]? or anything about operating system and processor development from the past 20 years?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privilege_level

>What utter BS.

What silly outrage. That explanation is so close enough for an audience full of laypeople.

It's a lie (intentional or not), and one that does the author a disservice by (a) making him look like a fool to his peers, and (b) obfuscating the actual benefits of his computing model (which, from the paper, look to have more to do increasing performance of certain parallel algorithms rather than fault-tolerance).

This article makes it sounds like he is applying a microkernel with user space modules to multi-processor systems.

New scientist article on this has better info. Data and instructions are packaged together, are passed around, and executed with a pseudo-random timer offsetting a unit of work to avoid a single thread over consuming resources. They also want to apply machine learning to have certain error conditions self repair through auto code manipulation.

Here's a much better article on the topic:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21729045.400-the-compu...

Here is a paper of Bentley's that appears to be talking about the idea mentioned in the article:

http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/p.bentley/SABEC2.pdf

He has written other relevant stuff, but publicly available full-text versions are hard to find. For those who want to search, the key phrase seems to be "systemic computation".

And just in case it isn't clear: this is front-line research. There is no product to get the technical specs of.

Looks interesting, but it'd be nice to get the detailed, technical description of it, rather than some journalist's take on things.

That kind of computer will also make subtle and unpredictable mistakes.

Compared to a system which either gets it completely right or it doesn't.

The computer that can't get stuck in an infinite loop.

I don't think that is necessarily the same as one that can't crash.

It's not at all the same.

"Humans Invent does not support your browser as it is many years old- continue at your own risk!

Please consider upgrading to one of the following more modern browsers: - Google Chrome - Mozilla Firefox - Apple Safari - Internet Explorer 9"

I'm using IE10. Sterling effort there. If you can't even get your website to work, what hope is there for computers that don't crash?

Whenever I hear about something like this (eg, 'the uncrashable computer' or the 'indestructible drinking glass') it begs the question - what about one of the greatest misnomers of all? The Unsinkable Ship, her royal majesty's Titanic

George V was on the throne then. So if it were a royal ship, which it wasn't, then it would be his majesty's ship Titanic (HMS Titanic).

The prefix RMS which was used for the Titanic means Royal Mail Ship. i.e. it delivered mail.

</pedant>

Holy yellow bar. Couldn't read.

So all this guy is doing is cluster computing on a micro scale?

The article that can't give any details or make any sense.

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