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Data Transfer Has A Speed Limit
ChrisHanel writes "Yahoo News is reporting that despite the infinite climb data speeds seem to be making, scientists at Stanford say we'll eventually hit a barrier due to the inability to keep the data stable after a certain transfer speed. But no worries just yet; the watermark they've set is still 1,000 times faster than what we have now." Apparently: "The scientists confirmed this problem by firing up the particle accelerator at Stanford University and blasting electrons at a piece of the magnetic material used to store computer data."
While it does say that using the current magnetized bit storage system has a speed limit that is 1000 times the current, it is only with this method of storage. Hopefully by the time we could hit this limit we will have a new method of storage. Besides, if my data could be written at 1000x the max of current maybe I won't need memory any more (or maybe our storage will be memory). Anyone have any ideas what we will be storing at that speed? (other than everything happening around us and everyone else so we have instant replay on life).
I am still confident that a 747 full of DVDs will beat anything we have in the next few years. Sadly the latency is a bit too high for quake.
Well, if they can at least get some reliable results from pushing this particle accelerator thingy at close to the speed limit AND TEST IT....where's my particle accelerator drive?
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
"The scientists confirmed this problem by firing up the particle accelerator at Stanford University and blasting electrons at a piece of the magnetic material used to store computer data." I wish I had a particle accelerator just lying around, that'd be sweet.
especially from reading The Rapidly Changing Face of Computing newsletter (now known as - The Harrow Report, it's that whatever barriers to computer speed increases are set up by theoreticists are quickly knocked down by other theoreticists who find ways around them.'
Of course, this doesn't mean that finding the barriers is a bad thing - it gives the next set of scientists something to aim for and pushes the boundaries of research.
A little planning goes a long way...
RAID arrays, SMP, GPRS, Data MUX's that use paralell fibre channels are all examples.
And if you thought that was boring you obviously havn't read my Journal ;-)
However, Seagate's chief technology officer, Mark Kryder, said the project had few real implications for the data-storage industry.
"Certainly we are not going to start packaging linear accelerators into hard disk drives,
Fools, cutting themself out of the linear accelerator harddrive market already. I'm switching to WD..Every advancement in technology has to hit a limit at some point. I don't see how this could be any bit of a suprise if thats what the article is trying to insinuate. Speed of light, eventual size of microprocessors, width of fibres, strength of metals etc... There is no infinitely 'advanceable' technology which should be obvious. Technology has come a long way in the past 100 years as well, the limits we discover will only continue to be found quickly.
If the dollar is an "I owe you nothing", then the Euro is a "Who owes you nothing." - Doug Casey
the transit rate of the average human digestive system has a maximum speed too, but you don't need to feed someone a cayenne and wasabi-laden, amoebic dysentery-infested mexican dinner plate in order to prove it ;-P
but, i suppose, you don't need to throw elemental sodium into a swimming pool to do basic chemistry either
so rock on particle physicists!
it must be fun to play with accelerators...
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
c
Magnetic tape: $1.75
Linear Particle Accelerator at a major university: $2,300,000,000
Picosecond access to your pr0n: Priceless.
For everything else, there's Mastercard.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Remember that this only applies to magnetic media, so future writable technology (polymers, optical, solid state, etc) wouldn't have this limitation.
..we will all have a particle accelerator hooked up to eth0?
28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes and 12 seconds... that is when the world will end.
People once believed that if a train went too fast, that all the air would be pushed out of it.
This proposition is just a modern equivalent of that idea.
Perhaps electromagnetic pulses have a physical limitation with data transfer accuracy, but that is by no means the threshold of data speed in any way.
Once again, RTFA. It speaks of EM data - not all data.
Si tacuisses philosophus mansisses. If you had kept quiet, you would have remained a philosopher.
2^10 = 1024. So we have 10 doublings of the speed of data left to go right? How often do data speeds double? (Using these methods of course).
I wonder sort of progress will be impacted in practical terms. There are limits to everything of course. Just one more limit. I hope I'm alive to run into some of these scientific limits so I can see what innovative workarounds people come up with.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Actually, no
The problem comes from the transfer itself due to the limits of magnetic storage. While this isn't mentioned in the summary, if you were to RTFA then you would see that the problem arrives when you fire electrons at a magnetic storage material fast enough (approaching the speed of light) they stop behaving in the expected way, and start producing random results. This of course is unacceptable for a storage medium, because if you increase the increase the pulses to write to the disk to near the speed of light it will result in random bits being flipped here and there and corrupt your data.
-geoff313
should be enough for everyone.
Help savingAmigaOS and a free PowerPC market
This kind of thing crops up now and again in lots of fields. It's basically the same problem that keeps being predicted with our Interstate Highway system. There's a safe limit as to the speed that we can have cars travelling, and if the highways fill up, bumper to bumper all moving at that speed, we've reached capacity.
The most obvious solution there is the same as the obvious solution here: Add more lanes. If you have thirty-two lanes of traffic instead of one, you've increased your capacity roughly 32 times. Same situation here: Transmit 32 bits in parallel (simultaneously) down distinct channels, rather than in serial (one at a time).
Just as building more lanes is expensive, here the expense comes in multiplying all of the necessary hardware to handle wider data busses for as far down the path as necessary to deal with more data in parallel. Right now, we've got parallel busses inside our PCs, but the bits often end up serialized at some point inside our processors, down at the microcode level. All of these bottlenecks need to be categorized and eliminated to overcome such a theoretical data transfer limit. It will be neither easy nor inexpensive, especially when we decide we need to send and process, say, 2048 bits in parallel in order to meet our data processing needs. At some point, it becomes more economical to separate things on a higher level (add more processors, or add more PCs), similar to building additional highways rather than just adding lanes.
It's hard for thee to kick against the pricks.
This limit only applies to hard drive media, so the title should be "Hard drive media has a data transfer limit" not "data transfer has a limit".
Wow, tautological perfection. I've never seen such.
Yes, we can always show some (incomplete) "proof" that we can't do X. And then we usually end up doing X in a novel and unexpected way.
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
And, BTW, FYI, FWIW, Moore's "law" is more of an empirical observation than any sort of real law, much less one that would apply in this case of magnetics without a transistor in (relevant) sight. I don't mean to detract from the clever, albeit obvious in hindsight, prediction of Moore. He simply observed (and presciently predicted) that there is (and will continue to be) a sustained exponential growth in the number of transistors per integrated circuit (that's "switches" per "chip" to you and me).
That has absolutely not one goddamn thing to do with this topic or the cited article, so STFU or RTFM first. Please.
everything in moderation
If you spin the disk more slowly, but have multiple heads then the limit probably doesn't apply- but the throughput would be the same.
And of course, you can always RAID your disks which does a similar thing. Or multiple platters, or...
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"(very slightly off topic... sorry.) I attended a physics colloquium the other week in which a professor from Duke was presenting the results of his research into the question of whether information could be sent faster than light through the various ways of coaxing wave speeds to be faster than c in anomalously dispersive media. If you concoct a medium in which the index of refraction decreases as the wavelength of light increases, the "group velocity", or the speed at which pulses propagate, can be made to be faster than c. The "phase velocity", or the velocity at which each frequency of light propagates, is still less than c, but the pulse that each frequency is a part of is going faster than light. The problem is that for the most part, the shape of a wave is pretty deterministic once you've seen a fairly small sample of the waveform. So recieving just the first few microseconds / nanoseconds / etc. of the pulse tells you everything about all of the frequencies which make it up. But he added a nondeterministic part to the signal he sent (through this anomalously dispersive media), changing the shape of the pulse midstream depending on whether he was sending a "1" or a "0". He then timed how long it took before his detector could tell whether the incoming pulse was a "1" or a "0", and determined that despite the media appearing to emit the pulse before it recieved the pulse, his detector still could not differentiate between a "1" and a "0" faster than the speed of light. So Einstein (and Maxwell) continues to be vindicated, and information cannot possibly travel faster than the speed of light.
Computers use since ages parallelism to boost performance whenever necessary. Writing a TB file? Just use an array of 10 100GB HD in parallel. Do you need a 1 Tb/s link? Use 100 optical fiber channels at 10 Gb/s speed. etc.
I believe that Heisenberg's uncertainty principle would suggesti a upper bound for how fast data can be transmitted over a single channel using photons. Can any physicist give me a reason why teh following reasoning would not be correct?
dx*dp = h/2*PI (Heisenberg's uncertainty principle)
Which any one with a undertanding of physics would know implies that:
dE*dt = h/2*PI
E = hf would be the energy of a photon of frequency f. Therefore dE = h*df.
h*df*dt = h/2*PI simplifies to dt = 1/2*PI*df.
If we have a two state device, than this would be teh minimum amount of time we would need to detect a single bit change. Simply invert the equation to get the number of bits/second you could transmit over a single channel.
Damn! I wish I had a job where I could say "Let's fire up the particle accelerator"...
Great! Then Viagra will really be irrelevant.
ymmv
erm moores law
is not a law
its on aboservation about a trend in the commercial development of microprcessors
which the manufactirresr adhere to as it is their entire revenue model.
its not a physical rule.
the guy who came up with it set up intel for gawds sake.
Hmm...
Well, they always said, "Gigs will never fly".
Nevrar
We'll find a way around that too. We're humans! We find a way around everything!
You'll never go back to that after you've experienced data transfer via bad news.
Karma: -2^0.5 . Mainly due to the imbibing of dihydrogen monoxide
"the scientists confirmed this problem by firing up the particle accelerator at Stanford University and blasting electrons at a piece of the magnetic material used to store computer data....
...The researchers noticed that the magnetic patterns left behind were somewhat chaotic"
:)
Well, there's a surprise for ya..... Would never have guessed that.... not in a million years, no, never.
I might point out that all natural laws are derived strictly through empirical observation. In fact, that's the very definition of such a law.
Moore's Law is what an engineer would call a "rule of thumb." Something which is understood not to be a law, but within certain constraints can be treated as if it were. This observation is included in the full version of Moore's Law, as actually written by Moore himself.
Like Newton's Law of Gravity, which can be applied as if it were law, so long as you are not Mercury, as was in noted by Newton himself in his original statement of his law.
The writers of laws are not to be held accountable for the misinterpretations of others.
None of this has much of anything to do with the article either (nor does the heading under which the story appears, which is what the OP was responding to, which is perfectly valid). However, I do not believe STFU is an argument, so I will not apply it to myself, or you for that matter.
Post on, McDuff.
KFG
Everything has a limit, even data transfer.
I have been transfering data at the known limit for nearly my entire life life. It's called "c" for short.
Anyone who can work the on/off switch of a flashlight can do it.
I believe that it is generally acknowledged that this is a true limit that no amount of thinking may resolve (There may be those who disagree, but it is up to them to demonstrate that such is even possible).
Storing the data is a somewhat different issue.
KFG
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It cannot. On the receiver side, you get one of four states at random. Those four states are such that every measurement you do on your result will have a random outcome from which you cannot conclude what was sent. Only with the information measured on the sender side and then transmitted through classical communication (and therefore, at maximum with the speed of light), you can decode the function.
You can think of it as if during teleportation, the data sent is encrypted with an automatically chosen random one-time pad. Now the sender measures exactly that one-time pad, and sends it classically to the receiver. Until the receiver gets the one-time pad, he has no chance to decode the message.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
http://www.geocities.com/duanenavarre/PRISM-HDSS.h tm
http://www.aprilisinc.com/holographic_storage.htm
Peace !
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Hard drives today are like the good old magnetic tapes of yesterday. Huge storage, slow access. Access times are still in the milliseconds range, and transfer rates... Heck, transfer rates are ridiculously small compared to the huge capacities we are getting. Who cares about magnetization speed limit with those pending issues...
And what keeps track of the synchronisation between all these wonderfull links ? At some point the data must be used and processed in a useful manner. Otherwise the article would be "There is no limit to how much data can be processed by an unlimited number of computers".
No, the upper speed limit on any data transfer is c. With quantum entanglement, i.e. teleporting your data, you don't know when your data has arrived and cannot check unless you are sure. Else you blow the whole transfer. To do this you must send across at least one "bit". Say a single photon.
If you do hazard a guess, you must still perform a measurement to retrieve the data.
All this cannot happen faster than c.
Bollocks. Once the link would be set up and information kept flowing using quantum entanglement there's absolutely nothing stopping the information of new events in the other end to reach the other end way faster than with speed of light. It's not information that "travels faster than light" it's actually the localization that get's broken. This has zero impact on causality.
Einstain's remark about information not being able to travel faster than c was because he assumed that there had to be a "carrier". And it's actually also the quantum physics delocalization that is contradictory with general theory of relativity (for the record, it's not the only aspect either, but hell, we've had to deal with this dualism for better half of a century now).
1 Earth is warming, 2 It's us, 3 it's royally bad, 4 we need to take action NOW
It cannot. On the receiver side, you get one of four states at random. Those four states are such that every measurement you do on your result will have a random outcome from which you cannot conclude what was sent. Only with the information measured on the sender side and then transmitted through classical communication (and therefore, at maximum with the speed of light), you can decode the function.
You can think of it as if during teleportation, the data sent is encrypted with an automatically chosen random one-time pad. Now the sender measures exactly that one-time pad, and sends it classically to the receiver. Until the receiver gets the one-time pad, he has no chance to decode the message.
You missed the point, you're talking about quantum cryptography, which is quite a different thing.
This is about having the photon source in the middle that sends to two superposed photons to opposite directions. Now, what's amazing is that you can force the state of the other photon in the other end to what you want, and if the other end hasn't checked it yet (it has be that wee bit further) it gets opposite state due to the superposition. And there, once the link's up and running, information can be "teleported".
It basically doesn't "travel" faster than light, it's the localization that's broken, but yes information can go from A to B faster than light would.
Setting up the link is slow however, you need the photon source in the middle and it takes time for photons to fly from the middle to the end points, but when you get the steady flow of photons you can send information at an instant.
1 Earth is warming, 2 It's us, 3 it's royally bad, 4 we need to take action NOW
No. You are wrong. Quantum entanglement does not lead to faster-than-light data transfer. See here: http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?numb er=612
Like the Stefan-Boltzmann law that was derived theoretically, not empirically.
This is just like so many predictions from modems - I remember hearing that over 9600 was impossible (and before that over 1200). Ditto for Moore's 'law'. Granted it is a great observation, but the predicted demise keeps getting pushed back.
While the article makes it clear it is for magnetic storage, the headline doesn't. And, as with all the other limits, smart people will work through the problems or change mediums.
This is just over-hyping a research article which is making a good point - that there are limits to current technology extrapolation.
I am quite sure that this statement is wrong. You can't "force the state" of an entangled photon. All you know if you measure a photon and it's in state X is that your friend will measure the entangled photon in state NOT-X.
See EPR Paradox, and this answer for more information and references.
Boy is this ever a piece to get attention if I ever seen one. Bad title Slashdot! The article deals with magnetic media only.
Moore's Law should be put in the realm of economics, just as Say's Law. It is an observation on the _Behaviour_ of producers, who cater for a certain known demand and bet that their R&D expenses are reimbursed by higher prices for faster products. Because everybody is doing it, investing less means loosing market share, investing too much does not increase profits proportionately.
Some people seem to think that it is an physical law, because it has to do with microprocessors. if someone does make such an mistake, he deserves a STFU, as not to influence others with his uninformed opinion.
maybe the grand-parent-article thinks the barrier is temporary, and can be technically solved. RTFA:
"In order to go beyond this limit, some completely new technology will be required, of which we do not know anything yet," Pescia wrote.
we can not make affirmative statements on unknowns. THAT is ignorant.
as an economist, i say, that putting faith in economic laws is a receipt for failure, eventually ( at lim t-> infinite).
Fight Frist Psoting!
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As the Ideal Gas Law may be derived from the Kinetic Theory of Gasses. Note that it was the empirical observations that leant credence to the Theory. It conformed to them.
Empirical evidence is always the touchstone.
Note that the very link you provide states that Stefan derived his law experimentally a few years before Boltzman derived it theoretically.
Not that it really matters much. The key point is that it wouldn't have been considered a law until it had been derived empirically.
Then there's Einstein's Law of Absolutes, which is destined to remain the Special Theory of Relativity, even though it has been empirically verfied and show to hold up as well, or better, than the classical "laws" (for instance it rendered Newton's Law of Gravity into a mere special case of itself), but that has more to do with a shift in scientific philosophy in the 20th century. We don't actually hold much truck with laws any more.
We have mathmatical models.
Of course there are those that hold that mathmatics is the only reality.
Pythagoras lives!
KFG
For the non-chemistry geeks among us, this may be helpful in understanding the parent.
. . .the parent.
Who to this day, decades after first encountering it, still finds it a stunningly beautiful theoretical demonstration that gasses must be composed of small particles that obey the laws of motion.
KFG
Infinite pigeons with infinite discs yields infinite data speed.
[scene - A man standing in a white coat in front of a panel of blinking lights with a large red button. Panel attached to wall with a small viewing glass]
:)
[Joe - frantically mashing the big button and peering through the window, laughing in a slightly mad fashion]
[Enter Bob, stage right - also dressed in a white coat]
Bob: [steady, staid tones] Joe, what are you doing?
Joe: [excited] It kept saying "Bad Disk Sector", "Bad Disk Sector", "Bad Disk Sector", so I so I threw it against the wall, then I stepped on it, then, then, then it was still in one piece so....
Bob: [still steady]: Joe, you do realize that every time you push that button it sends another electron shooting down the particle accelarator...
Joe: [laughing unsteadily and still frantically pushing button]
Bob: And each time the particle accelerator fires it uses one tenth of our available power....
Joe: [unceasing in his manic button pressing]
Bob: Are you sure we have the reserves for this?
[cue blinking light above station]
[cue overhead voice]
Voice: Reserve Depleted, Switching to External Power Source
Joe: [giggling] ooOooh I think I got it good that time
[cue crackling electronics]
[Cue joe stops, steps back confused]
[Cue lights down, single muffled spot on scientists]
Joe: Umm...Bob, What Happened?
Bob: I believe that was the North-East US blacking out...I'm not sure they'll be happy when we tell them you were using the particle accelerator to get even with your floppy disk
Joe: Well, well, well, we'll just tell them we were doing a study, yeah, a study on, um, maximum data transfer rates, yeah, and, um, it took longer then we thought?
[cue final lights down]
Whee signature.
The only link I can find substantiating this is Wikipedia's article on Moore's Law, which points out that hard disk performance has significantly lagged behind capacity. If anyone has hard figures for hard disk speed increases since the early 80s, please post.
The point is, that while a 1,000x theoretical limit might be of immediate concern in relation to CPU speed, extrapolating from the hard disk speed trend, we aren't likely to be hitting a 1,000x limit with hard drives any time soon. (And, as people have pointed out, this only applies to a single head in any case.)
Hey, where's my rimshot!??!
The scary thing is that someone will figure out how to fit that particle accelerator into a hard disk enclosure before we figure out how to make the battery on my laptop last a full workday without a recharge.
linkie b
... so the dream of surfing for porn at an infinite speed is over *sob*
And unfortunately Seagate admitted they were not planning on including particle accelerators in their hard disks any time soon...
If they did, that would give new meaning to "ghosting" a drive. They'd have to come with a product warning: Don't cross the bitstreams. It would be bad.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
These problems won't be prevalent with holographic storage mediums. When they get it right.
It is NOT about data transfer, or even data storage. It is about magnetic writing. Did the submitter RTFA or just the also-incorrect title?
As far as storage, 10 years ago they could store a gigabyte in a 3D crystal the size of a sugar cube and read the whole thing back in a second. {HOLOGRAPHIC MEMORIES , By: Psaltis, Demetri, Mok, Fai, Scientific American, 00368733, Nov95, Vol. 273, Issue 5}. That was before the many advances in optical storage technology, particularly high frequency lasers. And using only ONE laser focus, which even DVDs already surpass.
As for transfer rate, look to astrophysics. Radio astronomers listen to signals using amplifiers that carry a billion channels at once. That's a hell of a parallel system. Turn it around and broadcast through it using plain old 8N1+stop protocol in parallel and you're moving 100 MB PER PULSE. Multiply that times your chosen broadcast primary frequency, say 1 GHz, and you're moving 100 petabytes per second, give or take the shift to the lowest frequency on the MUXing.
It's usually at this point that the engineers start sputtering about how impossible it is due to Fourier transform limitations, proving they're not aware that radio astronomers were listening to thousands of channels even before they had time/freqency analysis via continuous wavelet transform running in real time.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
We've heard this sort of thing before back in the BBS days. No one thought we could get more than 9600 baud with a modem over the existing POTs. Now we not only have "56k" modems but DSL technology up to 8Mpbs over short runs (available now) with much higher speeds on the way. Someone always comes up with a probably/theoretical limit on bandwidth, processing power, etc, etc and someone else always comes along and finds a clever new way to break that limit. It's a long way off before we hit the limit they are talking about with our current technology. Who knows what we'll have by then. I mark this article as plus one interesting but minus several points for not being important from a realistic and practical standpoint.
Speed = latency
Bandwidth = Well, bandwidth
Need to move more people across the border? You dont need to break the speed limit, you just need a bigger truck.
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.