If commercially viable, this looks very disruptive to me: if everyone can get virtually unlimited, ultra-fast, lasts-a-million-years local storage in all their Internet-connected devices, the planet's online needs would change significantly in unpredictable ways. For example, third-party cloud-storage providers would face intense price pressure as more customers find it cheaper to store data locally and pay for more bandwidth.
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PS. Does anyone here have sufficient knowledge of or experience with Photonics and nanostructured glass to comment on the near-term feasibility and commercial viability of this technology? Here's the paper: http://www.orc.soton.ac.uk/fileadmin/downloads/5D_Data_Stora...
Keep in mind that a positive research result is not necessarily anywhere close to any of usability, commercial viability, or even possibility outside the lab. Nuclear fusion is a prominent example of this, and I'm still waiting for MRAM, which has been "around the corner" for quite some time now. Until memory glass may be available, who knows what else is.
Everspin needs to market it better... but yeah, if you're a Computer Engineer, you can build MRAM systems. The issue now is to build computers that actually take advantage of MRAM.
Its a niche product. No one wants MRAM right now, so the people who produce it can sell it for however much they want to.
Its not necessarily better than DDR3 RAM as RAM, and its significantly less dense than Flash RAM. The practical applications of MRAM are not quite as popular as once thought...
So... it remains a niche product, with a niche price.
Again, MRAM is a niche product. So is a crypto chip. If you want a crypto chip, they are already available with Flash RAM / Microcontroller combos. There's no need to use MRAM for that application, when Flash is already widespread and cheap.
I disagree with your irrelevant comparison to fusion technologies. It's not like they have to create crazy powerful magnetic confinement fields here. It's lasers and glass. The CD went from an initiative at Phillips in 1974 to release in 1983. 9 years to fully develop and do a production release.
I think it's inspiring, and I'm thankful I'm alive to see all of it unfold before us.
It's ultrafast femtosecond pulse lasers, spatial light modulators, and lab-quality fused silica glass. Nobody has ever put any of those into a consumer product before. The CD combined microscopic feature casting in plastic (same technology used for phonograph records since at least the 1930s if not the 1890s), metal-plating of plastic (from the 1950s), room-temperature semiconductor lasers (from the 1970s, although I don't know when their first mass-market product was), error-correction codes (commonly used since the 1940s), and PCM (from the 1930s, but, I think, only then being rolled out on a grand scale for digital telephony). The only one of the component technologies that might have had uncertainty as to its suitability for mass-market uses would have been the semiconductor laser diode, and in theory it wasn't necessary — you could have built CD players with HeNe lasers like the ones being rolled out in supermarket barcode scanners at the time, and which had been used for freight-car barcode scanners for a decade, but they would have been heavy and fragile like a tube radio or fluorescent light, not rugged and lightweight.
Aside from this, the storage technology itself might turn out not to work. It's holographic, and extrapolating is perilous in holography — some small source of noise that isn't significant when you have a megabyte of data recorded might turn out to be overwhelming when you have ten gigabytes of data recorded, let alone hundreds of terabytes.
Also, it occurs to me that megapixel spatial light modulators are also the key element in megapixel projector displays, so that might also be already ready for prime time.
TI just released an FRAM memory (instead of FLASH) version of the MSP430.
It has several features which make it better suited to ultra-low power operation.
I know FRAM was popular 10 years or so ago, but never really made it big. I'd always assumed someone had a patent locked up that made other companies avoid it. Maybe that's changed recently?
MRAM and FRAM are commercially available solutions, but the status quo of the computer industry is to build SSDs out of much much slower (but far more dense) Flash RAM.
> Keep in mind that a positive research result is not necessarily anywhere close to any of usability, commercial viability, or even possibility outside the lab. Nuclear fusion is a prominent example of this, and I'm still waiting for MRAM
I, for one, am still waiting for those jelly fish based CPU :(
They don't actually claim it's fast or give any measurements of speed (apart from "ultrafast laser"). It seems reasonable to be on the order of other laser-based optical storage systems (CD, DVD, blueray).
EDIT see also https://qht.co/item?id=6034075
Instead, longevity and data density is emphasised, and application for long-term storage. Sounds like a replacement for tape.
If the read/write/access speed is going to be good enough then perhaps it might replace HDD and depend on SSD as another cache level. The SSD cache would need to be page-file-based (just like OS caches file pages in RAM). block-based caching would be horribly inefficient in this case.
This also got me thinking about a filesystem for the 'superman memory'. It could be an extremely simple logging filesystem without garbage collection. Since the storage is supposed to be enourmous this could work for more than just a an incremental backup.
"third-party cloud-storage providers would face intense price pressure"
…or it could go the other way and they would be able to offer "eternal cumulative storage" for a low fee. This tech will be big and expensive before it's small and ubiquitous. There may be a first mover advantage to being able to afford the early models.
In the article they don't say if it's a re-writable device.
Supposing it's not, it would be useful only for big archives : you want to use the full 360 Tb available, because the crystal can be expensive. An average user don't have 360 Tb to write everyday.
If the crystal was cheap, or if you could build smaller crystals that store less Tb , it would be different.
As lifeformed said, nothing is said about the reading speed.
Or you create a novel filesystem that allows you to use an exotically large capacity, write-once volume as a less exotically large, write-many volume with built-in, block-level history.
Seems pretty easy. Just store your file system in some immutable tree structure (ala Haskell or Clojure, where "changes" don't actually change the tree but instead create a new tree referencing parts of the old tree).
I worked in optics in grad school. I think that near-term commercial viability is not good. The precision optics and the ultrafast laser would have to be heavily adapted to work outside the lab, and would be needed for both read and write.
It's not disruptive unless it's not only commercially viable but actually cheaper, and I know that without even having read Christensen's book. Also I think they said they were writing data at some small multiple of 200 kilobits per second, which hardly qualifies as "ultra-fast".
Available data will expand to exceed capacity. The amount of data created (or desired to be stored) will always exceed capacity to store (and process) it.
It would be disruptive, same as every other couple of orders magnitude storage in the past and in the future.
They are getting 12 kbit/s right now, and claim they could get Mbit/s to Gbit/s using very fast light modulators (which themselves are research-lab projects, to my knowledge).[1]
The phrase "ultra-fast" laser is a term of art, which really means "laser with ultra-short pulses". They are using a laser with pretty short, 280 fs, pulses, but only a 200 kHz repetition rate.[2] It evidently takes several pulses to write one bit. Due to the physics of femtosecond lasers, you can't easily increase the rep rate without compromising the pulse length and intensity, which both need to be very good in this application.
The readout "should" be faster than "conventional" methods, but no details are given.[1] I don't see evidence that they have shown even moderate speed readout. It looks like they took micrographs and then inspected the images to determine the values of the bits.
A "balanced" computer system used to follow the "one second" heuristic. (Is this named after somebody?) That is you should be able to offload temporary memory (core) to permanent storage in one second. And it should be able to execute a computation on every element of memory in one second too. I know this has held up through the gigaword generation. Leading edge computers, like a supercomputer, may be unbalanced where one of these factors lags.
Let me correct myself. I came across Jim Grey's 1999 paper "Rules of Thumb in Data Engineering" where he states that this heuristic is from Gene Amdahl in about 1965: a balanced system has one bit of I/O per second for each instruction per second and one byte of memory for each instruction per second. So, 8 MIPS per MBpsIO, and one MB/MIPS.
"The experiments were performed with a femtosecond laser system Pharos (Light Conversion Ltd.) operating at 1030 nm and delivering 8 μJ pulses of 280 fs at 200 kHz repetition rate."
My €0.02 bet is that that means 200 kilobit per second. In layman's terms: about twice as fast as we could send data to Voyager 1 when it was near Jupiter aka 'abysmal'.
"delivering 8 μJ pulses of 280 fs at 200 kHz repetition rate."
8.0E-6 J * 2.0E5/s = 1.6 J/s = 1.6W
So, this laser outputs 1.6W of power (in very short pulses, but that is irrelevant here). Let's assume a LED powered laser. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_conversion_efficiency gives, optimistically, 35% efficiency for a LED. That would mean a single-laser version would use 5W, a 100-laser one 500W of input power.
=> Some improvements are needed before this replaces hard disks at home. We'll see whether there is room for that.
Not really - it would just continue the trend of offline local storage and maybe make the Internet more distributed. Pretty much only cloud hosting providers would be affected.
ISPs would probably be pressured into finally going big or going home with their bandwidth, too, which is a good thing.
The new Utah NSA facility is planning for zetabyte (million petabyte) bandwidths. We dont use this much yet, but may during the lifetime of that facility. Humankind has an insatiable appetite for digital storage.
Storage is already pretty cheap, but it's a pain in the ass to manage, because you need to handle backups and make sure they are not in one spot, so a fire won't destroy 50 years of your photos. That's why cloud services and online backup is so successful recently. People want somebody else to secure their data, and they are willing to pay for it.
Our future is small computers + high speed internet available everywhere + online storage and services. Not the other way around.
"Our future is small computers + high speed internet available everywhere + online storage and services. Not the other way around."
Assuming our current technology, maybe. If I have limitless storage, and you do, too, I can be your backup, and you mine. Trickling in the background, always backing up. Or we could all have a mesh network backup doing similar to Dropbox crossed with Napster, without the centralization of either. Depending on bandwidth and storage growth, of course. Maybe the future is small computers, high-speed Internet available everywhere, and mass mesh storage/backup. Hopefully with encryption, however it goes, please God.
Mesh networks are still online storage from a users perspective in that it's limited by the users network connection. Also there is some software capable of this the problem is giving up a fair amount of bandwidth and storage capacity for somewhat safe but free backups vs paying ~50$ a year for safer backups without the headache.
PS: Popular torrent files are basically this already as they can persist a long time after the initial seeder stops seeding.
In this case, you're only limited by your network speed in the event of data-destroying event. In the normal case it's completely local, which has much less headache than any network option most of the time.
As much as I am discomforted by continued erosion of privacy and as much as I intend to try and keep mine intact as possible, I think this backlash will come to essentially nothing. Convenience is too great so people would just gradually learn to live in a world where mostly anything you do is public unless you go to great lengths to hide it. For the next generation, it just would be the new norm and I don't think we can do much about it. We can try to minimize harm done to civil liberties, etc. but I don't think we can prevent the change from happening.
"Our future is small computers + high speed internet available everywhere + online storage and services. Not the other way around."
That's nice. If you perform a cursory examination of computer science history, you will find many examples of "what's new is old." Any new paradigm, usage scenario, software type, or what have you could invert that. Even the one you like so much ... I think they had these things called dumb terminals and mainframes at one point ...
Storage isn't so cheap when you consider that it doesn't last very long, so we're constantly having to move stuff to newer (thankfully usually bigger) storage devices.
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PS. Does anyone here have sufficient knowledge of or experience with Photonics and nanostructured glass to comment on the near-term feasibility and commercial viability of this technology? Here's the paper: http://www.orc.soton.ac.uk/fileadmin/downloads/5D_Data_Stora...