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.

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