Cosmic Rays: what is the probability they will affect a program?

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From Wikipedia:

Studies by IBM in the 1990s suggest that computers typically experience about one cosmic-ray-induced error per 256 megabytes of RAM per month.[15]

This means a probability of 3.7 × 10-9 per byte per month, or 1.4 × 10-15 per byte per second. If your program runs for 1 minute and occupies 20 MB of RAM, then the failure probability would be

                 60 × 20 × 1024²
1 - (1 - 1.4e-15)                = 1.8e-6 a.k.a. "5 nines"

Error checking can help to reduce the aftermath of failure. Also, because of more compact size of chips as commented by Joe, the failure rate could be different from what it was 20 years ago.

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