[Beowulf] Curious about ECC vs non-ECC in practice

[Greg Lindahl]

On Fri, May 20, 2011 at 08:52:43AM -0700, Lux, Jim (337C) wrote:

> As hardware gets smaller and faster and lower power, the "cost" to provide
> extra computational resources to implement a strategy like this gets
> smaller, relative to the ever increasing human labor cost to try and make
> it perfect.

The cost is teaching users to add checks to their codes, and to any
off-the-shelf codes they start using.

In hyrodynamics (cfd), often you have quantities which are explicitly
conserved by the equations, and others which are conserved by physics
but not by the particular numerical method you're using. The latter
were quite handy for finding bugs. I managed to discover several
numerical accuracy bugs in pre-release versions of the PathScale
compilers that way. "Yes, it's a bug if the 12th decimal place
changes."

-- greg