What is a data hazard? A hazard is defined as any event or condition which puts at risk personnel, equipment or material; or any combination thereof. A hazard may also be physical or a combination of both physical and psychological. Data hazards can occur in all sorts of environments, including office, school, factory or home. A person or a system becomes a data hazard when hazards are created due to inadequate information, human error, equipment malfunction. In addition, certain types of data are easily reproducible and may cause harm when improperly analyzed.

A data hazard occurs when a foreseeable physical event results in an inadequate or erroneous distribution of instructions, specifically next instruction, or an incomplete information process. A typical physical event is an equipment failure resulting in oil or other hazardous gasses spilling out of the pipelines, or an electrical component overheating leading to loss of life or serious damage to critical components. A typical psychological event or situation that creates a data hazard is an incorrect execution of a pipeline design, or an instruction that causes the pipelines to skip a step or cut short the flow of data.

Data hazards can be avoided by following specific guidelines for designing a pipeline. The first guideline is to identify the physical configuration of the system and create a virtual machine which will translate the physical into virtual machine instructions. Another solution for data hazards is to use software which allows one to generate virtual machines, or virtual machines which simulate hardware. For example, Java virtual machine and interpreted language virtual machine both can be used to create and run Java code in real time. Based on the type of the application (e.g. database, web services, business process), one can choose appropriate virtual machine for the particular application.

What is a data hazard when executed in wrong pipeline layout? A data hazard occurs when a wrong pipeline is followed, leading to data sharing or communication problem between various processes or application servers. Pipelines are the series of instructions that define the sequential execution of an instruction. In case of a wrong pipeline, one can get different results for different processes. An example is – if two processes execute two different instructions, but the second instruction does not return, it will affect the outcome of the first process and this is also called a deadlock.

What is a data hazard when executed without proper monitoring? If an application fails to detect an instruction stream until it sleeps or there is no watchdog process, it is called a deadlock. The main reason why this happens is that a simple over-saturated pipe will consume too many clocks, resulting in an overflow. The application that is sleeping or not watching for the pipes will receive the incorrect data, resulting in another deadlock.

What is a data hazard when executed poorly? Inappropriate pipelining design and bad computer systems architecture are the two major reasons for this kind of issue. The excessive pipelining in the system can lead to stalls and other problems. The excessive pipelining can also cause erroneous communication between different processes in an application. The improper CSI and IDC addressing in the computer systems architecture can cause other kinds of issues.

What is a data hazard when executed badly? A bad or wrong CSI/IDC mapping between CSVs and IODs can cause incorrect execution result. CSI/IDC mappings are computer codes written in assembly language, describing how to generate an instruction stream. If the mappings of instructions are wrong, a wrong program counter (PC) or interruptible condition can be generated. For instance – if an instruction stream for a function does not explicitly specify an IOD, a PC will be generated and the program counter will be set for the next instruction.

What is a data hazard when performed by inexperienced or unknowing users? In most cases, novice computer users do not understand the meaning of the CSVs. Therefore they execute the incorrect instructions. The incorrect PC or interruptible condition generated by these wrong instructions can accidentally lead to system crash or hardware failure. This can be avoided by understanding the meaning of the CSV and IODs in the computer systems architecture.