Random Accesses

I just saw a story about the NSA gearing up a datacenter to potentially hold a yottabyte of surveillance data. The whole surveillance angle itself is pretty interesting, but what caught my attention was the concept of the yottabyte. The yottabyte is 1024 bytes. That is three levels above the petabyte, which itself is a million gigabytes.

Lets first build up to the yottabyte in today’s standards. A one page Microsoft Word document is anywhere from 50 to 100 kilobytes (KB). A picture from your camera is typically anywhere from 0.5 to 3 megabytes (MB) and a song you might download from Itunes is usually about 3 or 4 megabytes (MB). Moving up the ladder, popular consumer devices such as iphones, ipods, and digital cameras hold anywhere from 1 to 100 gigabytes (GB) of storage capacity. The top of the line hard drives that you can buy at Best Buy are now 2 terabytes.

Assuming Google has 1 million servers each with 1 terabyte of storage (a size Google has already reached or likely will reach in the next year) we can estimate that Google has leap frogged the petabyte and now boasts a total worldwide storage capacity of roughly 1 exabyte. The storage capacity of the approximately 1 billion personal computers worldwide in 2009 with an average storage capacity of perhaps 250 gigabytes (GB) of storage each is not even half a zettabyte!

Source;http://singularityhub.com/2009/11/03/enter-the-yottabyte-one-billion-petabytes/

Last week Apple released the Magic Mouse, a new computer mouse with a "multitouch" interface that responds to movement of fingertips across its surface in addition to conventional click-and-drag actions. Archrival Microsoft isn't ready to launch a competing product just yet, but the company does have plans for its own multitouch mice. Earlier this month, researchers presented five prototypes at the User Interface Software and Technology in Victoria, British Columbia, and their work won the symposium's best paper award.

With a multitouch mouse, a user can, for example, browse through a virtual stack of digital photos by flicking a finger across the mouse's surface, rotate an image by stroking the mouse, or zoom in on a picture by drawing an arrowhead with a fingertip.

Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/23805/?a=f

At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco recently, NVIDIA announced a GPU-powered 3D Web platform. Called the NVIDIA RealityServer, it consists of Tesla GPUs, rendering software and a Web service environment, all integrated into a platform designed to deliver photorealistic image streams via a cloud computing model. The new offering is yet another example of how the company intends to push its high-end GPUs into CPU territory.

The basic idea behind RealityServer is to do all the heavy computation lifting of image rendering on the server side, such that photorealistic 3D content can be delivered interactively across the Web. That means mass-market devices from smart phones to desktops and everything in between can be used to do high-end imaging.

Applications include architectural design, product design, manufacturing and apparel styling, as well as HPC visual applications in such areas as oil and gas, medical diagnostics, and scientific research. As a result, potential users span the entire population: consumers, artists, product designers, doctors, architects, engineers, and scientists.

Source: http://www.hpcwire.com/features/NVIDIA-Pitches-GPU-Computing-in-the-Cloud-65217572.html

Being middleware, BOINC isn't nearly as well known as some of the grid computing-based volunteer projects – like SETI@home and Rosetta@home -- that exploit it. But the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing is pretty amazing software.

BOINC is an open source software platform for volunteer and grid computing projects. The software runs in the background on any type of computer, exploiting otherwise idle computing resources. Scientists have used BOINC to create volunteer computing projects, universities use it to build virtual supercomputing centers and corporations use it for grid computing.

Source: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/083109-boinc.html

Scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have developed an efficient method to detect entanglement shared among multiple parts of an optical system. They show how entanglement, in the form of beams of light simultaneously propagating along four distinct paths, can be detected with a surprisingly small number of measurements. Entanglement is an essential resource in quantum information science, which is the study of advanced computation and communication based on the laws of quantum mechanics.

In the May 8 issue of the journal Science, H. Jeff Kimble, the William L. Valentine Professor and professor of physics at Caltech, and his colleagues demonstrate for the first time that quantum uncertainty relations can be used to identify entangled states of light that are only available in the realm of quantum mechanics. Their approach builds on the famous Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which places a limit on the precision with which the momentum and position of a particle can be known simultaneously.

Entanglement, which lies at the heart of quantum physics, is a state in which the parts of a composite system are more strongly correlated than is possible for any classical counterparts, regardless of the distances separating them.

Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-05/ciot-cpd050809.php