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New Laser Data Transfer Rate Record Set At 26 Tbps
MasterPatricko writes "Scientists at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany have published a technique to push optical data transfer rates to new levels. The article says, 'The trick is to use what is known as a "fast Fourier transform" to unpick more than 300 separate colours of light in a laser beam, each encoded with its own string of information.'"
So that one episode in Voyager where Seven of Nine makes a "Fourier Analysis" wasn't total bullshit?
At those speeds, the entire Library of Congress collections could be sent down an optical fibre in 10 seconds.
Well played, BBC. Well played, indeed...
You wait until you try to download some HD 3D 'adult material'...
they used the American measuring system I'm familiar with: the Library-of-Congress.
At those speeds, the entire Library of Congress collections could be sent down an optical fibre in 10 seconds.
It surprised me that this came from bbc.co.uk
I'm not certain...British humor is puzzling.
0 = 1 + e^(Alt something)
The best part is they were off by a factor of 8, since Tbps means terabits per second. Not so well played after all...
Yeah, because "X Institute if Technology" is such an uncommon name.
It's not like there's IIT in Illinios of FIT in Florida or OIT in Oregan. Or a dozens of others of the form XIT and XYIT.
And if they used the other alternative "tech" they'd be copying caltech right?
The name that has everyone snickering in Germany: A shameless attempt at raising associations with the MIT by giving a German university a similar name.
And here I thought they were trying to associate themselves with David Hasselhoff. You know, KIT -> KITT -> The Hoff.
You mean like the IIITECH? (The International Internet Institute of Technology)
Lets see what happens when we send Congress through this thing?
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
Serious question: It seems like it could be possible to use an infinite number of colors with interpolated laster on pulse modulation to transmit an infinite amount of information. Why won't this work?
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
I really wish HDD speeds could come even close to this :(
ugh.
mod me funny
I know, it sucks having to wait 1:20 minutes for my LoCs instead of the average 0.17 minutes - I'm so disappointed in this new technology, so yesterday!
OFDM is the same modulation technique used for WLAN.
Seems like the hard part is generating that wide variety of wavelengths.
The thing which is kind of critical is that you need an FFT that you can process at several trillion operations a second.
The FA says they are doing this photonically, which to me, is the cool part.
Absolute statements are never true
This comes from a lack of understanding of the field, but can someone explain to me what happens before and after, when transmitting data? The last I worked on hardware was with serial UARTs, so is someone willing to take a moment to explain better or to point me in the right direction to find more information on how it works? The data is encoded into beams of light and transmitted from point to point. Upon "re-entry" into system at the end point, how is the information gathered and processed internally from this point? Does this rate of transmission get matched or have comparable mechanisms internal to the system? If data is moving at 26 Tbps, is it processed at anything even remotely similar, or does it fill a massive buffer? Much appreciated!
But why, you should have asked, is the BBC giving figures in units of LoCs?
They don't have books in Blighty?
Why? Are there any practical home uses for that kind of speed?
http://www.nature.com/nphoton/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nphoton.2011.74.html According to the abstract, the key contribution is an optical implementation of the Fast Fourier Transform (which is pretty cool). They only tested their work using fibre, not just laser beams or w/e is implied by the headline.
I work at the KIT and I can assure you that the goal of this new name (came from the fusion of the University of Karlsruhe and the Research Center of Karlsruhe) was to make it "sound" like MIT. I've even seen memos explaining that we should pronounce the letters KIT in English instead of German... which is both stupid and obvious in my opinion. The board of directors was pretty explicit on this topic. And yes, it has everyone snickering... maybe not in Germany, but in the old Forschungszentrum at least.
Anything that removes latency is useful.
Just the time needed to load rendering library code as you browse around the web slows you down. A bigger cache only helps after the first time you load it; the first time is still bogged down in disk transfer. SSD would help, but then something else would become the tentpole.
Just like channels in a fiber, if you get enough HDD in parallel, you might get somewhere close to it... (but don't ask me at what cost).
Do you drink at Scruffy's? If you don't, maybe you should :)
Finally someone adopts a useful metric and they get ridiculed for it!
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Boy, this will REALLY piss off the those entertainment fat cats...
They got upset because transferring a portion of their catalog no longer had a "cost" associated with it. What are they gonna do when transferring their entire catalog no longer even has a time-cost associated with it?
"The GPL is viral by design, like any good religion."
But why, you should have asked, is the BBC giving figures in units of LoCs?
Is the Library of Parliament (or whatever they call it) as big as the Library of Congress? If not, that might be part of your answer.
Why not just use a prism?
Definitely not often enough.
I work in this field so let me see what I can do to translate what's happening and which parts are actually interesting. I dont' know the details of the experiment I'm only going off the article's summary and assuming they're correct. (BTW, while I"m an expert in a tiny slice of this field, my "expert" level knowledge doesn't extend to the whole pie. So some things I say may be assumptions I've made and can be wrong. If you see a mis-statement please correct me.)
First off, we do fiber optics all day long for internet backbone communications. We even do "multi-mode" optical (different color/wavelength lasers) all day long but only for short cable lengths. Neither of which is article worthy. This thing called a "fast Fourier transform" is just math that is taught in school and is nothing even close to revolutionary, it is simply a fundamental mathematical tool of everything in this field.
First off let me give you the basic framework. When you're talking about sending data at these speeds and over these lengths, you can forget the idea that you're sending lots of data down the line in nice waveforms. The data is so distorted that significant energy is put into compensating and un-distorting the waveforms. Fiber optics at these speeds just doesn't work at all without heavy duty data recovery techniques. So we send down the line data, get back garbled gibberish, apply techniques for removing errors and you can recover your data stream.
So typically when we do "long haul" fiber (> 1k or so) we do single mode fiber, this means a single frequency or color (remember your physics, each color is a different frequency of light). This is because different frequencies of light travel at very slightly different speeds down the fiber and if you have long enough fiber this difference in speeds becomes significant and starts to harm your ability to regenerate the information. Additionally one frequency can cause noise in another frequency band so keeping things to a single frequency makes things more stable at long haul lengths. This is why "traditional methods to separate the different colours will not work".
So Professor Freude and the article:
There are two steps forward here:
1. He's using a single laser to create different frequencies of light. I don't know if this is a common technique or not. I've typically hear of different colors of light being generated by different lasers but I am not an optics guy so I'm not sure.
2. He's using an optical method in place of a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) instead of silicon that somehow helps him decode the data. An FFT mathematically converts from frequency domain to time domain so maybe he's just using a prism or something to separate the different frequencies as a pre-processor step and then pumping this into his processor, but I can't tell.
So Professor Freude and team and working on making "multi-mode" work at long haul. This is typically not done today so that's the step forward and since you can pack more information into your data stream if you include multiple frequencies, that's a nice win. but of course research success does not necessarily equal a marketable product.
(Again, I am not a guru here, so if you are, please politely correct any mis-statements I've made.)
d
all language nazi's will burne in heil!
If spending profit to improve the worth of your company actually resulted in higher short term stock prices, maybe... Currently it does the opposite.
Want faster Internet? Too bad, that kills our stock prices -- the investors won't allow it, we have to charge the customers more without letting the investors latch on to that profit so that we can spend it on improving our services. Too bad it's illegal to do that once you go public.
If it costs anything beyond standard maintenance, it's not coming to the giant ISPs. That's what was so great about the smaller ISPs, they could risk more to provide better service and eventually end up with better stock prices in the end. The big ISPs of today are so immobile, the transition would take too long and cause the short-sighted investors jump ship.
Seen it happen many times, don't take my word for it, do your own damn research if you actually care -- but you don't; so let's just bitch about not having fiber to the home, and make excuses for why our speeds suck in the US compared to smaller places, while marveling at new advances that will never reach us.
Under Comcast's current pricing model I pay about $60 for 250GB per month. This service would cost just over $15 billion per month. Or if they were going to keep my current cap of 250GB per month, and I were able to use the full 26Tb connection, I would hit that limit in 0.0096 seconds of use. HP printer ink and Comcast's internet pricing model tend to look very similar.
Here's a fast furry transform: http://media.fukung.net/images/5390/furries_internets_go.jpg
In Germany, it is.
BTW, I'm still waiting for the Schleswig-Holstein Institute of Technology. :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
If you only consider the paper materials, it would be. But after you factor in porn and torrented movies, you end up with quite a lot of information.
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)
The name that has everyone snickering in Germany: A shameless attempt at raising associations with the MIT by giving a German university a similar name.
With Germans obsession with David Hasselhoff, I figured it had more to do with KITT.
No one will ever need more than 1 Tbps.
Are you pulling a Bill Gates?
Ughh. way to gut the summary I had written.
Anyway here's the original paper in nature photonics
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2011.74
Basically the advancement in this technique is to take several incoming tributaries of data and use an optical FT method (OFDM) to encode into a single laser for transmission. Apparently the encoding/decoding is simple and low-power enough to fit on a silicon chip so this technology seems very implementable, just by upgrading the hardware on either end of existing fiber optic cables.
The BBC article with their 0.1 Libraries of Congress per second was great too ;)
I'd tell a UDP joke, but you may not get it. I'd tell a TCP joke, but I'd have to keep repeating it until you got it.
The British version of the Library of Congress would be the combination of the National Archives and the British Library. Given the BBC partly functions in the manner of the FCC, you may need to include the BBC archives in there as well. The sum total of these three collections probably exceeds the Library of Congress but there's no collective name for all of this information.
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)
What's the point if ISP caps are 4 - 5 GB per month?
Japanese domestic television is due to switch to a 7680x4320 at 60 frames per second format in 2020. Do not be surprised if the cable companies there seriously debate multi-terabit cables at least between studios and archives or distribution points. If you increase the quality to HDR (32bpp or greater), you start needing these kinds of speeds to the home.
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)
Wow, the summary is completely misleading and tells you nothing about the actual news. It reads like they just figured out that they can use multiple frequencies to send additional bands of data. Everybody with a slightest clue about how optical data transmission works knows this already. The news in TFA however is that they have figured out how to encode this data with a single laser instead of one laser per band making it enormously more economic. A car analogy would be if someone had figured out how to make cars fly without wings, and the summary would be "a new vehicle pushes transportation to its limits. by sitting in a container with an engine one can travel much faster than walking." Facepalm.
A Beowulf cluster of them does using raid 777.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
It may become possible to transmit a 7680x4320 60 frame per second feed on a Japanese television network, but:
1. Consumers will not have (or need) devices capable of displaying this quality of video
2. Most television content will not ever be produced in that format.
It seems to me that the most likely application would be that this standard would allow transmission of a high-quality digital movie to directly a theater, so the theater wouldn't ever have the movie "in house" (in order to mitigate piracy).
The BBC doesn't function anything like the FCC. The body you're looking for there is OFCOM. They handle frequency allocation*, what little broadcast content regulation we have**, the sort of thing the FCC would handle in the US. The US doesn't really have a counterpart to the BBC. The closest would be PBS, but they differ in some very important ways.
*Much like the FCC, they'll occasionally say something about public benefit before auctioning it all off to the highest bidder.
**As we don't have that many radio broadcast channels, and cable/sat are outside OFCOM's direct oversight, they don't have much to do here. They occasionally send a strongly-worded letter.
Consumers will not have *eyes* capable of benefiting from that quality of video, unless you're planning to put them in some sort of device that occupies their entire field of view.
The Japanese have already started manufacturing the televisions, so presumably they're working on replacement eye surgery for the remainder of the run-up. It can't be cyberpunk-style jacks, as you wouldn't need a tv for those.
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)
...Who read it as 26 tablespoons?
And AT&T will buy this technology and lock it away for the next 40 years then complain that they have to raise internet user rates to cover their yearly costs, a la the oil industry to alternative fuel sources.
Yeah I think you'd take the scholtech type variant there :)
You mean like the IIITECH? (The International Internet Institute of Technology)
That's just a rip-off of iiNet.*
* An Australian ISP, for those not in the iiKnow.
You got my hopes up there, thinking the quote might be from a much better book. I forgot the title, but it involves a sentient radio signal, an accidentally too-successful attempt to evolve artificial intelligence, wetware processors, and the eventual victory of a robotic caterpillar toy with a program more sophisticated than the owner expected.
Not sure about the robotic caterpillar part, but 'sentient radio signal' sounds a lot like A for Andromeda by Fred Hoyle.
Wikipedia says it's a TV series, but I remember reading the book - apparently a novelization of the show.
Why? Are there any practical home uses for that kind of speed?
Well, maybe 12Tbps is overkill, but I'm currently waiting for a five- to six-hour disk clone to finish.
This is only about half a terabyte, so:
12Tbps / 8 = 1.5TBps
0.5 @ 1.5/sec = 0.33 seconds
That would have made my day.
Nope, not the one.
In the one I remember, the signal is a form of radio-transmitted viral life parasitic on technological civilisations. It's picked up by a mars rover - which is insufficiently advanced for it to infect - and relayed through it's telemetry back to earth, where it is picked up by amateur radio enthusiasts with backyard radio telescopes, who then rebroadcast it at higher power for their friends - as well as much industrial machinary using advanced biological processors*. Those it can infect. Though it doesn't grow any nasty monsters it does play havoc as it spreads causing such disasters as the accidential death of hundreds of wristworn biomonitor-and-regulation devices, both infecting the biological processors as a computer virus would and using them to manufacture a conventional biological virus with which it can spread even to non-networked equipment. Throughout the struggle to contain the outbreak, human-engineered artificial intelligences are just starting to approach human levels of capability.
The head of a tech company has the caterpillar. A robotic organiser, given to him as a child. Most people outgrew them, transfering the database of life-managing information into a device more suitable for an adult to carry around, but he grew too attached to the personality to delete it. Being one of the longest-operating AIs around, and one who'se owner had been heavily into tinkering and actively encouraged it to attempt self-upgrade, it's one of the first to achieve the breakthrough to human-level thought. A fact it keeps to itsself for self-preservation, only choosing to reveal the full extent of it's intelligence towards the end of the book.
*One of them is a combine harvester. It's wetware chip is used as a image processor, scanning the stream of grain for insects and damaged crop then zapping it with lasers.
You can derive a set of sine waves that can reconstruct the original, but FFT will not break it down to the original sine waves. Only an orthogonal set. Two sine waves as you describe may be simple to pull apart reliably. Two sine waves is like factoring a prime.
The article even calls the data "orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) data streams". The authors are aware of this problem. That's why I pointed out this isn't a simple FFT solution.
Optical FFT means you don't have to decide which windowing function to use, or the size of the window. If you have any experience with FFT the implications will be obvious. If not, try any sound source and any FFT display software with different sizes and window functions, and you'll see you get different results depending on the settings. Then imagine not having to choose one.
I further speculated that selecting a specific set of input frequencies made it easier to separate. This part seems pretty obvious, but if you don't know FFT results are orthogonal, the reason won't make any sense.