Data Transfer Has A Speed Limit 355
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."
Limit only applies to Magnetic Storage (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Limit only applies to Magnetic Storage (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Limit only applies to Magnetic Storage (Score:3, Interesting)
Todays technology may limit what we can store on a magnetized bit storage system, but I do belive that by the time we hit this limit we will be able to store memories from a human mind in realtime. I think that the storagedevice it self may actually be something quite other than what we today think of as "storagedevices", some kind of human-looking clones perhaps? Lets not forget about Terminator II just yet
Re:Limit only applies to Magnetic Storage (Score:3, Interesting)
How many Libraries of Congress do you think the human mind can store? Using human minds as data storage makes about as much sense as using humans as energy generators in a big matrix...
Re:Limit only applies to Magnetic Storage (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Limit only applies to Magnetic Storage (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Limit only applies to Magnetic Storage (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Limit only applies to Magnetic Storage (Score:4, Funny)
Missed that one (Score:4, Funny)
Hey, where's my rimshot!??!
Re:Missed that one (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Limit only applies to Magnetic Storage (Score:3, Interesting)
Key Word: Food
Without the sun, there is no food unless machines produce it. And the Second Law of Thermodynamics dictates that the amount of energy they expend in creating the food will be greater than the energy stored in the food; and the energy stored in the food will be greater than the energy p
Hard disk performance hasn't increased that much.. (Score:4, Interesting)
The only link I can find substantiating this is Wikipedia's article on Moore's Law [wikipedia.org], 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.)
Re:Hard disk performance hasn't increased that muc (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Re:Limit only applies to Magnetic Storage (Score:5, Insightful)
This limit is interesting but won't have any practical impact on our ability to store data at faster rates than the limit, should we find an application requiring it...
Re:Limit only applies to Magnetic Storage (Score:2, Interesting)
Massive arrays of the will serve as a common memry block used both for working memory and storage memory.
Of course there will also be a thoretical limit to the bandwidth of these cells and any other means, as if nothing else there will be the time necessary to traverse the matrix.
But paralellism like we allready use can nullify
Not only that Re:Limit only applies to Magnetic St (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
Re:Limit only applies to *serial* Magnetic Storage (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Limit only applies to *serial* Magnetic Storage (Score:2)
PRISM/HDSS holographic drive systems (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.geocities.com/duanenavarre/PRISM-HDSS. h tm [geocities.com] [geocities.com]
http://www.aprilisinc.com/holographic_storage.htm [aprilisinc.com]
Peace !
Ex-MislTech
Re:Limit only applies to Magnetic Storage (Score:4, Interesting)
I would guess that would be so if you didn't wan't CPU performance increases. Even if the 1000x limit were reached, memory at that time would still be considerably faster than disc.
One problem with that assumption is that it assumes that you don't have to deal with seek times. Mechanical drives are best for long term storage, they are still far better for linear access, unlike RAM, random access on drives slows things down considerably. In short, you'll still need RAM, even if you don't consider it to be any thing more than a few GB or TB of cache (scaling up WRT capacity needs over time), as it is now, system DRAM could already be considered just another level of cache, so that won't necessarily change with faster drives.
I am still confident... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I am still confident... (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually you are quite right. To my knowledge the IT-industry are still using giant trucks loaded with storage to transfer data backups between datacenters. This method of transfering *huge* amounts of data will probably be faster than the pipes any datacenter have in place until the fibreoptical networks are so large and widespread that not having fibre in your household will be like not having a cellphone in mainland Europe.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I am still confident... (Score:3, Funny)
Call be paranoid, but that's quite a few figures there without citations :)
Regardless...
Wrong distance. Bandwidth, in this context, is the
Re:I am still confident... (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't make much sense otherwise.
Re:I am still confident... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I am still confident... (Score:2)
Re:I am still confident... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I am still confident... (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I want my particle accelerator drive (Score:2)
Cathode-ray tube memory [ed-thelen.org]
Re:I want my particle accelerator drive (Score:3, Interesting)
Certainly we are not going to start packaging linear accelerators into hard disk drives, so the kinds of speeds achieved in these experiments would never be observed in an actual recording device," Kryder said. "It's not something that's going to impact anything we're contemplating in hard disk drives
and anyways, the top dogs of HD acceleration tech are found here [kicks-ass.net] (was slashdotted yesterday)
Fun! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Fun! (Score:5, Interesting)
Although, if you want a High-Power accelerator, that's a different matter and it would be very interesting to do it. Hmm... Use your own power generator? I doubt the power company will be able to supply you TeV's through your power outlet, but then you would need your own Nuclear reactor to do that.
If you can make even a GeV accelerator, that would be impressive. If anyone's heard of such a back-yard project, let me know.
Re:Fun! (Score:2, Informative)
Jesus! And I thought my microwave oven was high-powered!
"Introducing the new Roentgen Roaster 3000 - gives a whole new meaning to nuking your food"
Re:Fun! (Score:4, Informative)
First, X-rays are definitely particles, as has been shown in various experiments. Also, X-rays are definitely waves, as has been shown in other various experiments. Light is both wave and particle.
Anyway, he wasn't talking about the X-rays themselves, or the microwaves themselves as the particles. What he meant was an X-ray tube is a particle accelerator. It operates by accelerating electrons through several hundred kilovolts, and slamming them into a metal target (tungsten). Hence it is a particle accelerator.
A microwave operates by a magnetron device, which is a circular chamber with a high voltage between the inner cathode and the outer walls. Electrons are emitted from the cathode and are accelerated toward the walls. However, a magnetic field causes them to spiral and create a rotating radial electric field which sweeps through a number of resonant cavities, which then resonate at microwave frequency. Hence a magnetron is a particle accelerator.
Re:Fun! (Score:2)
If there's one thing I've learnt... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:If there's one thing I've learnt... (Score:4, Insightful)
LS
Pratice allready has another way out...... (Score:5, Insightful)
RAID arrays, SMP, GPRS, Data MUX's that use paralell fibre channels are all examples.
Not transfer in the internet sense, (Score:2)
Re:Not transfer in the internet sense, (Score:5, Informative)
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
Re:Not transfer in the internet sense, (Score:2)
If the data comes from/goes to a HD, if you take the HD out of the equation the limit goes away (for a while, perhaps).
Future markets (Score:5, Funny)
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..Name one thing that doesn't hit a barrier ?!?! (Score:3, Insightful)
inelegant and elegant proofs (Score:5, Funny)
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...
"Data Transfer Has A Speed Limit" (Score:5, Funny)
Re:"Data Transfer Has A Speed Limit" (Score:3, Funny)
No. (Score:2)
That is still too slow (Score:2, Funny)
Re:No. (Score:3, Informative)
You can think of it as if during teleportation, the data sent is encrypted with an automatically chosen ran
Re:No. (Score:3, Interesting)
You can think of it as if during teleportation, the data sent is encrypted with an automatically chosen ran
Re:No. (Score:2, Interesting)
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 entangleme
Re:No. (Score:5, Informative)
I'll be the first (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Re:I'll be the first (Score:2)
Perhaps the banks had anticipated the increase in consumer credit card usage and the magnetic bandwidth limit when they designed the system, hence the decision to put 4 paralell tracks.
to sum it up... (Score:3, Informative)
Remember that this only applies to magnetic media, so future writable technology (polymers, optical, solid state, etc) wouldn't have this limitation.
So in the future.. (Score:2, Funny)
RTFA - oh, and the sky is falling too.. (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
So what's the timescale here? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:So what's the timescale here? (Score:2)
Re:So what's the timescale here? (Score:2)
Only half right. (Score:2)
640 Gbps (Score:5, Funny)
Serial Limit Only (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Serial Limit Only (Score:3, Interesting)
This is why a lot of the new high speed buses are serial (USB, firewire etc.)
Wrong title (Score:2, Informative)
Pathetic. (Score:2)
RAID.
Nuff sed.
Light traveling faster than light? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Light traveling faster than light? (Score:3, Informative)
The grandparent poster seems to be confusing things a bit. Let's try to clarify...
Except for the Lorentz transformation, the most important equation in Special Relativity theory is the Energy-Momentum relation:
(This is true for all inertial reference frames, and embodies the fact that the contraction of the energy-momentum 4-vector for a particle is an lorentz invariant. The Dirac equation, the Klein-Goron equation, and much of modern quantum fiel
QM Mechanical limit (Score:2, Interesting)
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 hav
Re:QM Mechanical limit (Score:2)
And in principle it's easy: If you want to get more bits per second, you must change your signal more often, which implies a higher frequency.
Particle accelerator (Score:2, Funny)
Damn! I wish I had a job where I could say "Let's fire up the particle accelerator"...
Theme park broadband connection: (Score:2)
-Adam
do photons even exist? (Score:2)
Solved in the 80s (Score:2)
Flying Gigs (Score:3, Funny)
Well, they always said, "Gigs will never fly".
Hah! (Score:2)
Sledgehammer vs Nut (Score:3, Funny)
Well, there's a surprise for ya..... Would never have guessed that.... not in a million years, no, never.
You'll never catch up (Score:2)
Re:You'll never catch up (Score:2)
Hard drives are so slow anyway... (Score:2, Insightful)
Not if we breed more pigeons! (Score:5, Funny)
"Scientific Study" A Play in one part (Score:3, Funny)
[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]
That's not the scary part (Score:5, Funny)
Wait... (Score:3, Funny)
Magnetic Storage (Score:3, Interesting)
WRONG WRONG WRONG (Score:3, Informative)
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.
We've heard this before... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:So true (Score:5, Insightful)
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" [intel.com] 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.
Re:So true (Score:5, Informative)
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
economic law , not physical (Score:5, Insightful)
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).
Re:economic law , not physical (Score:5, Insightful)
If someone makes a mistake he deserves to be corrected. As per this very example.
And as per the rules of Slashdot not even the GNAA people deserve to be told to STFU. They deserve to be modded to oblivion and otherwise ignored.
To believe that saying STFU is an argument that counters an uninformed opinion is ignorant. Therefore I have countered it with a more informed and sophisticated one.
That's ok, we're all ignorant of something, and seeing as you're an economist you aren't used to the rules of reasoning, discussion and debate. That doens't mean you can't learn them and relieve yourself of such ignorance though.
Here's a quicky course.
All idea may be expressed.
Not all ideas are equal. Some of them are downright stupid.
It's ok to call a stupid idea stupid and say why.
It is not ok to tell a person he is stupid. Attack the idea, not the person.
Telling someone to STFU violates the first and last rule here expressed.
Now you know. Now we need not give further thought to the idea that just because you're an economist you don't know the basic rules.
PFFTCPWIDYL.
KFG
Re:So true (Score:3, Informative)
For the non-chemistry geeks among us, this [gsu.edu] may be helpful in understanding the parent.
Re:So true (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:So true (Score:2, Interesting)
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
Re:Simple fix (Score:2)
Re:only 1000 times faster? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:My first computer was 4MHz and that was in 1983 (Score:2)
That may be not as much as processor speed, but it can't be ignored either.
Re:Commandor Data was faster than light ... (Score:2)