As the demand for data usage and storage grows exponentially, its scale, capabilities and applications have grown in tandem. In the nearly 40 years of technological progress, 128-gigabyte micro SD cards used in today’s smartphones can now store as much data as two semitrucks of 8-pound Priam hard drives from 1985.
All data must be stored in a physical location, either within the device itself or at a remote data center that the device accesses. The data contained in smartphone apps, books, games and movies are often stored physically in warehouses, known as cloud data centers, owned by tech companies.
A single data center can contain hundreds of thousands of servers. Most cloud computing is performed via servers, with each server having complex microprocessor chips equipped with semiconductor technologies.
In recent years, cloud data centers have faced spontaneous and undetectable chip failure known as silent data corruption, or SDC, which occurs when a central processing unit inadvertently causes errors while processing data.
Most SDCs are not yet traceable by software, meaning data is often processed incorrectly and lost without any indication of the cause, says Krishnendu Chakrabarty, the Fulton Professor of Microelectronics in the School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering, part of the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University.