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'Millipede' Prototype Shown at CeBIT
neutron_p writes "It was a subject of much controversy for last 5 - 7 years, but it's finally got protyped. At CeBIT, IBM for the first time shows the prototype of "Millipede" - nanomechanical data storage device. Using revolutionary nanotechnology, scientists at the IBM Zurich R&D Lab, Switzerland, have made it to the millionths of a millimeter range, achieving data storage densities of more than one terabit per square inch, equivalent to storing the content of 25 DVDs on an area the size of a postage stamp. The principle of operation is comparable with the old punch cards, but now with structural dimensions in the nanometer scale and the ability to erase data and rewrite the medium."
Like when you drop a three foot tall stack of them in the computer lab and have to spend several hours putting them back in order?
(true story)
...the worlds smallest keypunch.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
"The principle of operation is comparable with the old punch cards"
So now we feed these stamp sized cards intot he big machine, and it says "working!, working!, working!" till it spits out another stamp with the answer.
Awesome.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
but how many Libraries of Congress per VW-beetles is it?
a way to store all my porn on the same volume.
This kind of device would be incredible for backup purposes, and the recording method seems to be fast as well, but would they accept almost-unlimited rewrites? In that case, this technology could finally replace magnetic devices. Solid state is always better, but so far, the existing alternatives don't offer the durability and flexibility of hard disks.
The next step is obvious...the Ultra Shuffle!
Also plays FM radio, records voice, AND hooks up to your retina so you can watch a random selection of up to 25 DVDs!
I wouldn't say this is a dupe, the other article is about a startup company aiming at what could be considered a similar target. This is new information regarding IBM actually realizing that target.
The following statement is true
The preceding statement is false
That is some insane data density, to have more than one terabit per inch. And here those crazy people though nano-tech would bring about "grey goo" -- little did they know the only goo it'd bring about is from the toughts of Slashdotters having a multiple TB's of porn on myeir harddrives.
Windows has detected an undetectable error.
Actually, the slashdot article you reference is not the IBM millipede project, but another company trying to implement a rather similar idea. But the fact that two different companies are competing on a new technology hardly makes the separate stories dupes!
Unfortunately, I hear that any hardware that uses the "millipede" ends up being a bit "buggy"...
I thought you were talking about this:
p ede.jpg
http://david-matthias.piranho.de/atari/protomilli
Now what would really be cool is if we actually used this like a stamp. You know, where secret messages aren't written on the letter, but are actually in the stamp itself.
Granted, stamps are expensive enough as it is, so maybe it's not such a great idea...
This is invigorating to see. It's interesting that we come full-circle back to punch cards with these polymer wafers. I wonder if it will suffer from any of the read/write limitations that exist with flash ROM storage?
At any rate, the fact that it requires so little energy and that it's orders of magnitude smaller than magnetic storage.. if it's as reliable as magnetic and optical discs, this would revolutionize storage even in long-term storage applications where data reliability is a factor.
I Want To Believe
Obviously, on 10 centipedes, rotated weekly.
... is a nano gun and some nano mushrooms! Ah those were the days.
"So there he is, risen from the dead. Like that fella, E. T." - Father Ted Crilly
1. What's the read/write speed?
2. What's the operating temperature requirements?
3. What's the max operating heat output per unit?
4. How many concurrant inputs/outputs can we get into a unit?
5. What's the failure rate/expected operating lifespan?
6. What's the near-term expected commodity cost of these units?
7. Given 1-6, how many units would be needed to make a properly redundant filesystem with at least the reliability and speed of current file storage devices on the market? What would be the expected near-term cost?
Ryan Fenton
Halfway down, some of their speculations of the mechanical limits of this hint at seeking the capacity to createw tools that could act as DNA excision repair tools and neeto stuff like that.
Most nanotech that I have seen hasn't really made me think of the possibility of such function, but it would be one of those interesting twists of fate of cancer repair came out of data storage.
On the flip side... it really sucks as to how hard this could make it to counterfeit currency. Definately need to make sure such devices are open source.
For those interested, here are some advantages I see to this technology:
1. Increased storage density. More importantly, this prototype is not near any fundamental limit. Hence, it would appear that there is plenty of room to reduce the dimensions of the MEMS tips to increase storage densities way past what a magnetic drive can do.
2. Data transfer rate. In principle, the thousdands of different tips can all return data at the same time, compared to, say, 4 bits returned at once from a 4-platter HDD. Of course, in real situations, not all 4000 bits will necessarily be of interest, but I think with smart caching and device layout the throughput should be very high (i.e.: contiguous bits in a file are spread out so that the entire file is read by the 4000 tips without anything moving).
3. Low seek times. In a HDD, the head must move by many centimeters in order to seek randomly. In Millipede, the entire surface moves by, at most, 100 micrometers to find a new location. It probably uses piezoelectrics, which are fast and robust. Thus, I see seek times being lower (at least in a mature device).
4. Scalable. This prototype has a single array of tips on a single polymer layer. Obviously it is straightforward to build real devices using 10 or 20 of these arrays stacked. Unlike the platters in a HDD, these arrays could be seeking independantly, so if properly designed, performance could be very good (like RAID maybe?).
5. Heat. The piezos shouldn't heat up too much, and even though the tips themselves use pinpoint heating to deform the polymer, I think the bulk device heat would be lower than a HDD spinning at 10k rpm. Less noise too.
6. Cost. By using established MEMS technology (i.e.: the same lithography used to make microchips nowadays) I don't think implementation costs (and future scaling) will be too expensive (as compared to some more far-fetched nanotech ideas).
This has been in the works for a long time, but I think we may actually see real devices soon! (6 years?) I think this technology has real potential, and I think IBM is right to pursue it.
Should I return the 1gb SD card I just bought?
"Ain't I a stinka..." - Bugs
Millipede was a Centipede clone. With bugs.
'Once scientists, even the dim-witted social scientists, get muzzled, the Western Civilization is finished.' - oldhack
What the hell does that mean? I know a postage stamp, but I would rather know REAL standards. What is the LoC/FF for that item? We need to use real scientific standards people. In data storage we talk about bits and bytes, when you talk data density, you can only use LoC/FF. Anything else is ludicrous! It's like talking about car speeds at Furlongs per Week.
Geez. I wish journalistic integrity was a bit higher. It just irks me to-
What? What's LoC/FF?
Libraries of Congress per Football Field of course. You know, the standard.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
Simple, punch tape drives.
..was that this news is about 23 years old, and that's gotta be some kind of record. Even for Slashdot.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
The article quotes 10,000 read/write cycles. Given that this number is probably a slight exagerration for PR purposes, it's a good start, but needs optimizing. Hopefully by the time this technology makes it to market, that will have increased that number enough that it will be competitive with magnetic drives. I think that this will definately be a viable replacement for flash drives.
The technology uses localized heating of a polymer past its glass transition. There is no reason that this should cause much material degredation if it is done properly (i.e.: avoiding temperature spikes, and engineering polymers that have an accessibly low glass-transition temperature while also being robust against thermal cycling). I think with enough engineering this could be done. There is alot of research on heating polymers past the glass-transition temperature, so they won't be reinventing the wheel or anything.
If we are talking about 4Gb dvd, one Tb is 250 dvds ...
From the story title, I thought they'd dug out a prototype Millipede arcade cabinet.
That would have been much cooler, IMHO. They could have even made a couple bucks in quarters.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
This technology sounds wonderful, but at the same time dangerous. You could have some extremely potent monitoring devices with this thing: Cameras that can record for weeks or months, microphones can record for years, etc. Then again, the practical uses sound great, our ram is going to be forever changed, and I wont need to sweat over 1gb.
"Please do not fold, spindle or mutilate the nanotech memory."
Holding enormous amounts of data becomes less and less useful in practical situations if you can't access a decent sized chunk of it quickly.
... all parameters within a range that was thought to be marketable (and reasonable) at the end of the devolopment when development started.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Centipede was a game. Not the bug. I think. Otherwise a centipede IS a bug. But who would clone THAT?
But how will we make a backup of those?
Just press it into a peice of silly putty to mirror the surface.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
A centipede can hold 10 millipedes, not the other way around! Sheesh...
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
As in US 2000 elections ? Then I don't want to have that !!!! The brother of the CPU will always win, because he's having "special recount" on the punch cards...
WTF, people?
...or is anyone else getting tired of these Libraries of Congress or Volkswagen Beetles measurement jokes?
C'mon, get with the program: Millipede was announced 23 years ago.
Can't they publish this information in some better known units of measurement. Like Libraries of Congress?
We're getting there, but we're not there yet. And we won't be until storage is truly ubiquitous. I've actually spent some of my weekend re-organizing my music collection, ripping CDs that hadn't listened in a while, etc. But even with the 600G of storage in my PC, I still can't have everything I want unless it's compressed. And I'm thinking about how to listen to my collection in my car. Bringing hundreds of CDs around with me isn't practical. MP3 CDs hold maybe 10-20 albums. HDD based devices (ipods and the like) still can't hold everything I own... not even close. And I want to have a DVD server so rather than pulling out the DVD, I can just call up one of the hundreds of DVDs I own on a menu.
Yes, storage is becoming more impressive all the time. But it's still a very long way from being to the point where you don't have to think about how and where you store and move your files. And it will be very cool when that day comes.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
What this obviously means is that I'm one step closer to a cyberpunk style computer in my skull. Who needs to learn when you have google access directly interfaced with your brain?
God, I hope I'm kidding...
I'm sorry, I'm still confused.
Is that the old VW Beetle, or the new one?
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
I thought we just backed everything up to gmail.
If you assumme some device that stores one bit per atom on the surface of a crystal of, say, silicon, exactly what storage density are we talking about?
Assumme only a 2D array as I really suspect getting at the internal atoms of a cube will never happen. (Though it is likely these devices can be stacked so eventually there may be engineering done to make them as thin as possible...)
My guess is that this device is still many orders of magnitude away, but I really don't know.
I'm really glad that there are still American companies around that are doing fundamental technological research that will improve our lives in the future. Sure IBM may be huge and somewhat evil in it's own way, but at least they know how to actually invent useful things, rather relying on lawsuits and dubious claims of "intellectual property" and whatnot to extract wealth from others.
Shit, shit, shit...I meant NOT in the insect family. Sigh. Like that's going to stave off the pedants. I am...too late.
Man, talk about an old news story.
We're all going to be out of work in a few years if this continues! /sarcasm I really like advances like this because it saves us time. Imagine what politics would look like if all of the IT brains that are writing redundant perl scrips suddenly applied their brains to history and politics. It'd probably change the world.
It's just like the industrial age, we can put down our sledge hammers(mice) and redirect our energy to more important things.
What if Digg added local news and a Slashdot inspired comment karma system? ---
http://houndwire.com
It seems to me that this kind of technology has been IBM's wild card for a long time. I think they've got a very good idea of what the face of the computer world will look like in a couple years, and they're doing everything they can to come out ahead. First they become a linux house, most likely because linux has proved to be a very nice archetecture to do things like clustering. Now they're finally using the nanotechnology they've been working on for years in such a way that they've created an amazing new technology like this. A technology, I might add, that has the potential to completely dominate the market and completely change the face of the computer world to the point where IBM is the largest hardware manufacturer in the world.....yet again. I'd love to see what's in their business plan for the next few years.
Total device: 6.4 mm length, tip pitch 100 um
/sec
-> 64 rows and 64 columns
-> 4096 tips
Writing speed (from TFwebsite): 'a few microsecond' (say 10)
-> 4096/10e-6 = 410 Mbit
Per tip: range 100 um, bit pitch 10 nm
-> 10000 x 10000 bits = 100 Mbit
Position resolution (really neat device using micro-heaters): 2 nm over 120 um ->
-> 60000 positions observable (probably 16 bit)
karma police: arrest this man, he talks in maths; he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio. [radiohead]
Don't worry, you get a little blaster ship to stop the bugs.
Just be sure to shoot out the mushrooms in your way and look out for those damned spiders!
We should classify millipede as a technology that is vital to national secure and should ban Chinese nationals from working on such projects. The Chinese would surely use such technology for nefarious purposes.
The oldest methods of "data storage" go back to the birth of written language. These involved either making impressions in the sand, or for more permanent storage making engravings into stone.
Although the closest analogy might be cuneform - the oldest known system of writing. It involved making indentations in clay with a wooden stick having a triangular end. You could get a triangle with or without a corner stretched out into a tail. (Looked a bit like ones and zeros. B-) )
Now if they use a medium paved with molecules that have two stable forms and use the probe to push them back and forth to store a bit, they'd have built the world's smallest abacus. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The question behind the questions is what potential roles that this product could fill.
If it can't run at room temperature conveniently, but can be made cheap per storage space and is reliable, then it may be useful in stationary servers for extreme-mass remote storage.
If it can run at room temperature and is somewhat affordable, but slow, it can be used as common backup.
If it can end up close but superior to hard disk in all aspects, then it may replace them.
If it can be fast enough to be used as live memory at room temperature, with conventional memory as cache, then even with a few limitations, it could transform the nature of computers as we experience them.
There's many, many other possibilities. Yes, of course, as you suggest, price will match the market - but the role this technology can play is limited more by it's logical capability than the market. If the possibility is open, it's usually much more of an opportunity if you can create a new technology in a market than to just replace another. That's why my questions are obvious - we all wonder how far this first generation of nanotechnology will take us.
Ryan Fenton
I guess this means I'm goning to have to buy another copy of the White Album.
Except that volume would be measured in mm^3. :0)
Actually, not too far off the bat... :)
Nanoimprint lithography has been demonstrated to reliably produce replicas in curable polymers on the order of around 10 nanometers.
Basically, you start with a "hard" patterned surface (e.g. SiO2, quartz) press it into a polymer (e.g. PDMS-polydimethyl silizane), heat it up to the glass transition temperature of the polymer (so that it flows and conforms around the master) and then proceed to cool and/or cure the polymer. You're left with a rubbery mold that can be subsequently used to "cast" replicas of the original.
man That is Insightful !!!!
I wonder if one would write data to it and then store it in a safe place for 20 years would one still have the original data on it? It is very questionable if one uses a cdr or dvdr disk if that data would still be present.
Read here a reference (to a paper in a scientific journal) to the work done well before 1994. Ehh...
I noticed that this is being designed for SD form factor, but I'm curious if they would be able to make a type 2 CF card with 8 of these devices in it for 1 terrabyte.
What about data transfer rate? Are these things fast enough they could compete with hard disk drives? Could we be seeing petabyte hard drives sometime in the future?
Will it have a hanging chad problem?
Producing chips through photolithography is approaching its physical limits. I wonder if you could use a nanotechnology device to produce chips, something like the one here, for instance maybe scraping away material instead of punching holes.
The principle is comparable with the old punch cards, but now with structural dimensions in the nanometer scale and the ability to erase data and rewrite the medium.
In other words, kinda-not-exactly-like punch cards.
In myy opinion, the ideal storage system for the future would supply enough capacity so that an individual can keep one medium for their personal data for their lifetime... perhaps use some form of log-based filesystem, where data is only appended, and never erased.
Maybe millipede will be a step towards this outcome... or at least, I can hope.
-- The universe began. Life started on a billion worlds...
-- Except on one where stupidity was there first.
football field: 100m by 60m = 6e9mm^2
chip: 10mm by 10mm = 1e2mm^2
number of chips = 6e7
number of Locs = 6e7/80 = 750e3
=> 750,000 Libraries of Congress per Football Field!
Being able to calculate that life:priceless.
ps. no life, I know.
1. What's the read/write speed?
One bit per minute.
With this much complexity: How stable, reliable and how fast and soon?
1,000 GB of porn on a card the size of a postage stamp?
Slashdotters, rejoice.
Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped.
You've calulated the volume of the chip
;-)
correctly (apart from using units of mm^2
instead of mm^3), but how in hell did you
come up with the volume of a VW?
1m = 1000mm
=> 7,710,952.32 mm^3 = 0.00771 m^3
=~ a 20x20x20 cm cube
I think your VW shrank in the rain/sun cycle
The 2021 Year edition. Title: How to hack your neighbors cortex. Also in review, how to reprogram the cortex of your girlfriend to put out more and enjoy it.
Life is not for the lazy.
Not to take away from the extreme coolness of this, since it is cool, but it's not nanotechnology. It's built using microelectronic fabrication techniques. We're a long way from nanofabrication yet.
I doubt it :)
MP3 Search Engine
It seems, from all I've read about this millipede technology, that the real bugaboo is re-writing bits. I'm wondering just how important that really is. While I would preserve the ability to destroy data (easily implemented by writing pits at every location) I think that 99% of the uses of this massive storage could be done without re-writing.
Let me think of a couple of scenarios for these chips:
1) Music storage and playback, as in an Ipod.
This is a perfect example of something that you never need erase. You very rarely want to replace the previous version of a song with a newer one -- mostly you just want to add to your collection. In the very odd case that I never want to hear a song ever again, I could destroy it.
2) My own business -- visual effects.
We scan and create a few terabytes a year of images. Perhaps surprisingly, we throw almost none of them away during production, keeping old versions of images as reference. Disks are cheap enough that there's no need to erase frames during a project, and these millipede devices promise to be rugged and permanent enough to act as their own long-term backup. We'd just disconnect the drives and store them on a shelf forever.
Clearly, we'd want to change the way that filesystems work -- maybe the directory structure would be kept in flash memory where just the data bytes are on the millipede surface until it's time to inter the disk in the archive.
I think that IBM, and others, should really consider the possibility of non-rewritable millipedes, especially because abandoning that capacity would appear to make everything else much much simpler and cheaper. They might make it into production sooner too.
Thad Beier
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
You know, with prototypes of Legend of Zelda 2005, Black and White 2, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Final Fantasy XII being shown, I'm hardly impressed by a prototype of Millipede.
Take any topic from politics to computing to medicine to god-knows-what. You'll get some tens to hundreds of thousands of hits, 90% of them written by bloggers talking out of the ass, and 90% of the rest obsolete.
E.g., I kid you not, on the German-language wikipedia there was a comprehensive article about cloned _didgeridoos_. Including pictures of little didgeridoos in test tubes.
E.g., if you google for Java techniques, you still find such Java 1.0 "optimizations" (and debatably not even true back in Java 1.0) as using exceptions instead of a loop counter. E.g., that to iterate through an array you should write a monstrosity like:On account that, meh, Java checks the bounds for you at each array indexing every time (and throws an exception if accessing beyond the end) anyway, so no point in checking the value of "i" yourself too. Makes sense, right?
Too bad it's false. Any modern Java JIT compiler will optimize away the index bounds check, if the value of "i" was already compared to the array length. So there is no speed gain from the above "optimization". Au contraire, because of the exception, it will actually be orders of magnitude slower.
And I'm not getting into the maintenance problems there. E.g., what if sometime in the future the do_something() method will use internally another array, and be able to throw the same exception itself for a real error? Oops, the exception was silently swallowed, and only maybe a quarter of the actual data was actually processed. I'm sure everyone will be pleased, for example, when only a quarter of the bank accounts get interest, or only a quarter of a company's orders are processed.
That's the whole problem and answer to your "who needs to learn" question. Without some actual knowledge, filtering the good data from such bullshit is plain impossible.
The reason you can still filter such crap is that you did already learn some stuff, and can discern what sounds plausible (i.e., matches what you've already learned) from what doesn't. E.g., when you find some scam ad for a magical sticker that can extend a battery's life by just being glued to the outside of the case, if you already know _some_ physics, you'll know why it's bullshit.
On the other hand, people who _didn't_ learn much, they're the ones falling prey to such scams. If you also wire them to Google and encourge them to not even try to learn anything ever... well, I _really_ pity them.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
A modern hard disk can only read from a single head at a time. It can't read multiple surfaces in parallel. There is only one head positioner and one servo channel. To read multiple surfaces in parallel, you would need an independent head positioner and servo channel for each surface.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat