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P2P Hard Disk System Warns of Tsunamis

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the using-existing-tech-over-again dept.

An anonymous reader writes to mention an article on NetworkWorld about a free software application that detects Tsunamis by listening for vibrations in the hard drives of computers. The peer-to-peer network uses the technology that allows HDDs to keep read-write heads on track, and passes the information to a network for analysis. From the article: "If an earthquake that could lead to a tsunami is detected, the supernodes inform the other nodes. Computers running the client software and connected to the peer-to-peer network can then warn of such events. The software is able to provide such warnings because the seismic waves produced by earthquakes travel at about 5,000 kilometers per hour, while tsunamis move much slower at 500 to 1,000 kilometers per hour"

3 of 192 comments (clear)

  1. mac equivalent nearly by ElephanTS · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I tried this out on my Macbook.

    http://www.suitable.com/tools/seismac.html

    Does a similar thing. Once caveat: you can never touch the mac. So it's useless really but an interesting demo of the motion detectors. They are suprisingly accurate. Footsteps nearby show up for instance.

    --
    spoonerize "magic trackpad"
  2. Needs to give feedback by FleaPlus · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'm running this thing right now, after downloading from here. It's kind of neat, but it'd be really nice if it gave some sort of feedback to the user to show it was actually operating. I'd like to be able to, say, kick my computer and watch a little seismometer guage move around, just to let me know the thing is working.

    Also, to the commenter who was worrying that things like kicks or shifts to a computer would result in false alarms, that's part of why they're using a P2P network. By aggregating the results from many machines, you can toss out false alarms. Of course, if a bunch of people got together on IRC to coordinate times at which they'd all kick their computers, that could probably trigger it... ;)

  3. Re:Interesting by Percy_Blakeney · · Score: 4, Interesting
    The only thing I don't see is talking about knowing where the machines are in the real world, which would be very helpful, and that may be coming later.

    I would be curious to see if they could automatically tell you where you are, using only the vibration data from your hard drive. Given a month or so of data, they might be able to correlate major events in your data set with major events in other data sets from known locations, thus allowing them to derive your geographic location.