Cosmic Rays in Memory
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Thanks to the wonderful real-time memory visualization package from Jamie Fenton developed initially as a FreeFrame plugin for FrameLab (a general FreeFrame host adaptor for DirectShow) and now with its own real-time memory viewer GUI front-end I was able to find the evidence for cosmic rays in computer memory! You can see them on this screenshot where the left panel is a condensed virtual memory map of IE process and the right panel is specific page(s) view (I found rays on pages starting from 0×3B4000 address):
- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -
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December 23rd, 2008 at 4:54 pm
Interesting observation. I am little bit fuzzy about the process of creation of such tracks in PC memory. Is this an ionization caused by a cosmic ray trace? Are bits damaged? Does it mean that some bits can be lost in any time in the memory because of randomly occurring cosmic rays?
January 10th, 2009 at 3:30 pm
I’m curretly investigating this a bit deeper. This might be an epiphenomenon or an artifact.
January 15th, 2009 at 3:46 pm
[…] 2009 (0×7D9) - The Year of DebuggingLast weekend I spent a few hours devising a cover for the forthcoming computer memory visualization book and finally created this one piece cover featuring a journey to the center of pagefile theme and the discovery of cosmic rays in memory: […]
April 20th, 2009 at 4:38 pm
[…] 14. End of Session (It wasn’t bad after all) 15. Face in the Memory Dump (after applying Natural Memory Visualization techniques: you can see pictures and various artifacts stored in memory […]
June 10th, 2009 at 5:06 pm
I’ve actually done testing of radiation effects on memory for a living. And worked for a VLSI/Memory tester vendor.
It’s possible to get a memory map pattern from cosmic rays but it is actually very, very unlikely to manifest so literally like this. Here’s the reasons:
1. Address Scramble
2. Data Array Layout (and Scramble)
3. Target Cross Section and Energy Deposition
P(seeing trivial track) ~ P(adjacency) * P(low oblique hit) * P(incident cosmic ray in time).
This gives a really small number, plus the effect of scrambles means it would never manifest like this. Nobody publishes scrambles (only internal test engineers even care) so odds are you wouldn’t be able to descramble to see the pattern in the first place.
June 10th, 2009 at 7:15 pm
Very interesting! I cannot believe myself too and I’m in search of another sumilar instance to investigate further whether it is simply a data artifact that looks like a ray by coincidence.
Thanks,
Dmitry