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A crashing computer is at best annoying and at worst catastrophic. But now a team of scientists has developed a new type of computer that never crashes — and it relies on chaos and randomness to achieve the feat.
New Scientist reports that the new “systemic” computer, designed and built at University College London, is fundamentally different to the computers we all currently use. The computers of today crunch lists: dragging operations from memory, working on them, and then storing the result back in memory, before moving on to the next. A computational core never really multitasks — it just seems like it does.
The new computer, however, joins data up with instructions about what should be done with it, and divides different results into separate systems. New Scientist explains:
Each system has a memory containing context-sensitive data that means it can only interact with other, similar systems. Rather than using a program counter, the systems are executed at times chosen by a pseudorandom number generator, designed to mimic nature’s randomness. The systems carry out their instructions simultaneously, with no one system taking precedence over the others…
Crucially, the systemic computer contains multiple copies of its instructions distributed across its many systems, so if one system becomes corrupted the computer can access another clean copy to repair its own code. And unlike conventional operating systems that crash when they can’t access a bit of memory, the systemic computer carries on regardless because each individual system carries its own memory.
The result? A computer that never fails because it repairs corrupted data on the fly. Just don’t expect it on your desktop any time soon. [New Scientist]
Image by alistairh under Creative Commons license
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I don’t think either of my 2 laptops (running Windows 7 & 1 of them XP for a few years before) have crashed for 5 years or so…
Windows by itself is probably extremely stable, it’s when you start installing applications. Even if an application is stable, there can be weird incompatibilities with specific other applications and only in that situation does the system become unstable. If you had a system and never installed any applications (desktop or web) at all then I’m sure it would be extremely stable. However, how useful will a PC be if you couldn’t install any applications.
I don’t see how that would mean it wouldn’t crash. Crashes normally happen because of software bugs, not because of hardware failures. Sounds like this can deal with certain hardware failures, but if the software has been written incorrectly in the first place, no amount of moving it between systems will make that software work.
Fuck that.. 2 words. Windows Vista. There’s your ultimate benchmarking programme for testing a systems stability.
Either that or try installing a printer.
http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/3t0frl/
What a total load of bollocks.
A computer only crashes when the instruction given to the processor is not understood – or a memory block is addressed that doesnt exist etc.
Computers will only do what you tell them to do – as for peripherals and hardware like hard drives etc can loose data – this isnt a crash, THE ACTUAL processor will not crash if being told to do something in the correct way and something that it understands.
Pointless bullshit giz guys, just when i was starting to think the past few days have had some good post’s…