cosmic_ray_detection

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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.

License

Licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0
• MIT license

at your option.

Contribution

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.