Optical Fiber Storage

TypeCast writes "When you've got Canada's elbow room, perhaps you can squeeze in a 'disk drive' 5,000 miles in diameter. But the plan by Canada's CANARIE researchers for a Wavelength Disk Drive (WDD) within optical networks suggests all of Universal Music's library would still make for a tight squeeze as light-speed storage. Here's a white paper on the WDD for those who aren't afraid of MS Word documents."

Comments

Bad news for MPAA and friends

[Anonymous Coward]

Our friendly geek is once again in a state court...
[judge] So does your controversial web page reside in California?
[geek] It resides in California 15 milliseconds every 350 milliseconds, your honor.
[judge] Pardon me?
[geek] My web page is served on optical fiber storage. It goes around the country in a big circle.
[judge] B-but it's stored somewhere in California, r-right?
[geek] No sir, it's encoded in photons travelling at the speed of light, you honor.
[judge] [thinking for a few seconds] Goodness, I'd rather be put on a simple divorce case.

Technology is circular

[gattaca]

I remember seeing an article about nano-motors that used vaporised water to move a piston that made a shaft rotate. A friend pointed out it was a steam engine. Just very small.

Now people are talking about fibre optic delay lines as storage devices. Some of the earliest computers stored data as sound waves in mercury and
nickel wires. A speaker injected sound in one end, it was picked up my a microphone at the other, re-shaped and squirted back in.

Same idea, different medium.

Canada, the InterComputer

[steveha]

They aren't doing this in an attempt to re-invent the hard disk. This is about peer-to-peer, massively parallel computation.

SETI@home works in client-server fashion: your desktop computer asks the main server for a chunk of data, then chews on the data and talks to the server again. This is massively parallel computation, but it isn't peer-to-peer, it's client/server.

When you put data on this fiber ring, within a very short time all the computers on the ring have seen the data. So if you want a bunch of computers to cooperate on a job, this would be a great way for them to update each other on what they are doing. If you did it right, you would have massively parallel distributed processing: all the computers in Canada tied into a single InterComputer. And just as Napster can spread popular songs around where a single FTP server would be hammered, an InterComputer potentially could handle truly large computations that any single computer (or even Beowulf cluster) couldn't.

Multicast data packets aren't new; that's why they said it takes only a few changes to try out their ideas. Multicast packets are currently designed to die fairly quickly so they can't clog a network up too much; these guys want the packets to go all the way around the ring.

P.S. That joke about the backhoe chopping the fiber was only a little bit funny, and then only the first time. When a backhoe hits a cable today, half of Canada does not lose Internet service! It isn't a trivial ring; it has some redundancy redundancy.

steveha

Converted it to PDF...

[Dell Brandstone]

I converted the white paper to PDF format.

You can download it here:
Wavedisk White Paper (PDF)

Cheers,
Chase