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Re: BGP Problem on 04/16/2007

  • From: Douglas Otis
  • Date: Thu Apr 19 14:23:01 2007


On Apr 19, 2007, at 10:03 AM, Robert E. Seastrom wrote:



"David Temkin" <[email protected]> writes:

From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On
Behalf Of Warren Kumari
Yup, Sandia National Labs made a radiation hardened Pentium and, as far as I remember, was working on a hardened SPARC -- there was also some work done (AFAIR on PPC) whereby 3 processors would run the same instructions and vote on the output...


Thinking of perhaps Resilience? http://www.resilience.com/

God, those things were horrid before they realized that the business model of assuming "The app will always be OK, the issue will be the hardware" was completely misguided. I forget what the product was named at the time, but I'll never forget what a piece of crap it was.

Eh, they're not the only folks to have had voting-muti-cpu-lockstep- execution hardware platforms. Stratus did it for years; the Tandem Integrity S2 (to which I ported Emacs 18.55 many moons ago) was similar.

I helped develop a digital communication system for the Navy at Huges back in the early 80s. We could only use fusable ROMS and rad-hard 8080s. (No break points.) Crystals where nudged into lock for three- way synchronous voting on defective systems/hardware. Mechanical inputs were also redundant, and of course a bear to resync. This lead to a snafu during war games with an aircraft carrier, where the air controller panel's gray-code rotor switches were erroneously flagged as defective during peak use. Luckily everyone lived.

-Doug