Your computer can double up as a cosmic ray detector. Yes, really!
Cosmic rays hit your computer all the time. If they hit the RAM, this can sometimes cause disturbances, like flipping a random bit in memory.
To use your computer as a cosmic ray detector, simply run this program!
The detection works by allocating a vector of zeroed bytes and then checking regularly to see if they are all still zero. Ta-da!
- Do not run this on a computer with ECC memory, as that will prevent the data corruption we are trying to detect!
- The chance of detection increases with the physical size of your DRAM modules and the percentage of them you allocate to this program.
- Beware of operating systems being clever, and e.g. compressing unused memory pages or swapping them to disk. A vector of nothing but zeros that hasn't been used in a while is an excellent target for this. This will shrink your detector!
- Expect detections to be very rare.
It may also not work on DDR5 memory modules and later as those contain onboard ECC.
Special thanks to
- /u/csdt0 and /u/HeroicKatora on reddit for ideas about how to improve the correctness of the program and avoid the pitfalls of virtual memory.
Licensed under either of Apache License, Version 2.0 or MIT license at your option.
Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.