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Using Lasers to Speed Computer Data
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "The start-up Lightfleet has developed an unusual way to use lasers to speed the flow of data inside a computer, hoping to break a bottleneck that can hamper machines using many microprocessors, the Wall Street Journal reports. The company plans to sell servers it predicts will be much more efficient than existing systems in tackling tough computing problems. Tasks could include automatically recognizing a face in a video image or sifting through billions of financial transactions for signs of illegal activity. These machines will attempt to sidestep some of the problems associated with parallel computation by ensuring all processors are connected, all the time."
Lightfleet is doing the opposite: using lenses to spread out laser beams and bounce the light off a mirror to send data around a system.
Sounds fragile, and expensive.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
Yes, I know, it's not actually IP, but that's what it makes me think of.
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Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
What - besides making your server highly susceptible to dust - does this do that HT does not?
Does anyone have any idea how they can have an all-to-all system in which messages don't collide? How is this faster than an electron based system?
Also, isn't dust in the circuits going to be much more of a concern with light based chips?
I can only hope this somehow involves sharks with freakin' laser beams on their freakin' heads.
If an insect gets inside that computer, then it can block a laserbeam. So debugging get's back to where debugging started: keeping insects out of computer equipment, so they don't obstruct lightpaths.
Nohing new to see here..move along...the TI chip that is in the DLP TVs does this already. (from wikipedia) In DLP projectors, the image is created by microscopically small mirrors laid out in a matrix on a semiconductor chip, known as a Digital Micromirror Device (DMD). Each mirror represents one pixel in the projected image. The number of mirrors corresponds to the resolution of the projected image. 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x720, and 1920x1080 (HDTV) matrices are some common DMD sizes. These mirrors can be repositioned rapidly to reflect light either through the lens or on to a heatsink (called a light dump in Barco terminology). The rapid repositioning of the mirrors (essentially switching between 'on' and 'off') allows the DMD to vary the intensity of the light being reflected out through the lens, creating shades of grey in addition to white (mirror in 'on' position) and black (mirror in 'off' position). This system is just a new application of a technology invented in the late 1980's. No reason it's groundbreaking and no reason it shouldn't work in theory. Solid state lasers are very reliable and have a long life time. However, I don't know of any chips that have the ability to directly receive laser light pulses from a source and convert them to 1's and 0's. And keeping the lasers, mirrors and receivers aligned might be tough.
Hey, I have played this game on c64. I think it was Deflektor.
I'm a bit surprised the Wall Street Journal would more or less paraphrase a vacuous press release and pass it off as an article.
I'm less surprised (but still surprised) that slashdot would pick up such a piece.
My suggestion for a tag:
pressreleaseaseasjournalism
The US Navy used to do networking over a Codenoll Passive Star network. The modified 10Base-FL NICs sent transmit pulses to passive hub, which optically coupled all the rcv/xmt ports together in what was essentially a fused glass blob. Codenoll calls it 10Base-FP.
The useful thing about it was being completely unpowered. The passive hub could stuffed into/behind anything where the fiber could reach it and there was no configuration, power, management, etc. Of course, those were also its weakness: no configuration, management, etc. A lot of these were installed in the early 90's, but I don't think the Navy uses them any more.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
Like, duh, everything is faster with freaking laser beams.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
I just wanted to give a big thanks to taggers for not putting the "sharks" tag on a laser-related article. At least, not yet anyway.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Imma Chargin' Mah Lazer!
After all, fricken' sharks need to swim...
Snake Oil. Actually, they don't even have a product yet. What's the term for raising money for an idea that will never fly?
Imagine a beowulf cluster of irate sea bass.
It's brutally long (51 pages!) but provides a lot more details.
Basically each node has N (or N-1) receivers spaced slightly apart, along with a single transmitter. These receivers & transmitters are all in the same plane opposite a mirror. Every node can transmit simultaneously. The different angles at which the transmitters hit the mirror cause the beams to focus on a different receiver within each node's array.
At least that's one possible embodiment...
Why are both examples of how a faster computer could benefit society framed in a 'law and order' and 'keep the public safe' context? Smart marketing that plays upon the already nicely laid groundwork of the American administration?
:/
I wonder if faster computers could help the average person in any way at all.. cant think of any examples tho.
-math
Moth finds nice, warm computer home. "Ooh! Pretty lights!" And a legendary term acquires new meaning.
Using lasers in free space to achieve fanout provides no advantage over using electrical circuits, but takes up more space. They've got far more managers than engineers working there. They've never even produced a working prototype. They have only a handful of angel investor capital, not enough to bring a product to market. The "Director of Product Technology" came to work there, decided that everything that had been done before him was crap and should be discarded, and pulled a completely new, inefficient, and probably unimplementable design out of his ass. Oh, and the "Chief Scientist and co-inventor" still listed on their web page got pissed off at the company for throwing away his original design back in September, and hasn't been into work since! Lightfleet... coming soon to a "fuckedcompany.com" website near you!
It will literally be like computing at the speed of light!
In using light to relay computer data, the only barrier that would be left would be to reduce the distance between two communicating nodes (or reduce overall size of the technology).
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Why not use fiber cables to connect the processors? It eliminates the problem with dust as well as the need for mirrors that take up system space.
so, I actually skimmed the article.
I'm way to lazy to actually read all of the words in it.
But isn't this just a "bus"? but its done with lasers?
I'm not really seeing the advatange, except that you get to use the word "laser" in your IPO?
The Sony/IBM/Toshiba Cell uP already has an onchip token ring running at 204GBps. Sony is reportedly developing an optical interconnect to join devices together, presumably at that speed (1.64Tbps).
What interconnects already exist anywhere near that speed? 10Gbps ethernet is about $400 per card on a PCIe bus, or 2x10Gbps on a card for $700. Is there 100Gbps for sale today at any price? Any other >10Gbps signalling on a PCIe card, or even on a motherboard?
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make install -not war
Lightfleet: because sending data through a serdes, a laser transmitter/receiver pair, and another serdes MUST be faster than sending data through a serdes, a piece of wire, and another serdes!
This is most definitely not point-to-point.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I'm restricted by NDA and by corporate policy in what I can say, so I won't comment on the article itself. I will say though that most newspapers are nothing more than paid advertising that run a few real articles as typing exercises.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
You're lucke that you posted that anonymously. :)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Not to be too harsh, but: 1) Nobody on their management, board of directors, or technical board has an optics background 2) They're doing this in free space. That's fine in a _mechanically stable environment_ 3) Computers are not mechanically stable enviroments. PCB boards flex. Things heat up and cool down. Everything moves around over time 4) Focusing a received laser beam to a detector requires precise alignment. A 1 GHz detector is ~ 0.4 mm square. A 12 GHz detector is 25 microns square (New Focus Optics). So, either they can do a slow data bus that's stable, or a fast one that isn't. They're screwed. Yes, I am an optical engineer.
Sounds to me like someone struck a raw nerve!
Waddya know? It works!
Have gnu, will travel.
think of it like this, electrons shooting down wires are like water through your plumbing.. they don't pass it two direction at once.
but, two FM stations on different frequencies can send their top forty music against each other at the same time without interfering.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random