University College London Have Built A Computer That 'Never Crashes'

[6Foot2]

Link: The computer that never crashes - tech - 14 February 2013 - New Scientist

 

...Dubbed a "systemic" computer, the self-repairing machine now operating at University College London (UCL) could keep mission-critical systems working...

[X-13]

Primary School Technician calls BS.

 

What about hardware failure? Or really badly coded software?

 

How about a power cut?

 

 

 

Still... It's cool.

[localzuk]

Not sure I understand this - they say the system is split up into parts, each with their own memory and their own processor etc... So, if one bit breaks, it can be fixed by the other bits, which still work.

 

But that only works for software that is flawless and could be done now with existing clusters of computers.

[dhicks]

Not sure I understand this - they say the system is split up into parts, each with their own memory and their own processor etc... So, if one bit breaks, it can be fixed by the other bits, which still work. But that only works for software that is flawless and could be done now with existing clusters of computers.

 

It's quite possible to write provably-correct code, that's what functional languages are for, but you have a limited computational scope - you cannot neccesarily compute all that it is physically possible to compute with a provable functional language. This computer doesn't sound like it's designed to run your standard spreadsheet or similar, it more resembles a brain in operation, so is probably designed to solve a given set of problems. It might be interesting to read the original paper - I wonder if they've built an actual chunk of dedicated hardware for this, or whether this is a bunch of virtual machines running on something else.

[Guest Guest]

We've had computers which never crash for years, they're called Macs... *cough*

[6Foot2]

...It might be interesting to read the original paper...

 

Link: Extending the Hardware Architecture of Systemic Computation to a Complete Programming Platform [PDF: Department of Computer Science University College London]

[SYNACK]

We've had computers which never crash for years, they're called Macs... *cough*

 

It is about the same, they are both unsubstantiated claims but with Macs this is demonstratinly false. As far as I know they have not built this thing yet.

[mjs_mjs]

Interesting but it's still a limited computer and still cannot calculate non computable functions. It indeed is a cluster with paralleled programs, it copes with failure by having redundancy built in. So far it's not doing anything that google doesn't/couldn't do.

[CESIL]

I have loads of computers that never crash, they are in a cupboard and not plugged in