1 Petabyte Holographic Storage Coming Soon?

Just a few years ago InPhase announced its revolutionary 300GB holographic disc which was supposed to change the way we store data in high volumes. Shortly afterwards Call/Recall announced their plans to develop a 1TB optical drive and disk with backwards compatibility with Blu-ray. Fast forward a few years to today and holographic imaging still hasn't caught on. Yet there is another holographic hopeful taking a shot at the ultra high-capacity optical disc market by the name of Storex Technologies and their Hyper CD technology. This time however its not a terabyte they are aiming for, but instead a whopping amount of 1,000,000 GB.

"The company holds patents on glass and glass-ceramics compositions as well as read/write mechanics and optics concept(s) applicable to high-density data storage. Using commercially available low power lasers and optics, capacities of more than 1,000,000 GB (1 PB) can be achieved using a CD size disk of 120mm in diameter and 1.2mm thick."

Storex Technologies was founded by Romanian scientist Eugen Pavel in 2007 and is, in effect, nothing more than a technology demonstration group looking for a partner to invest in their intellectual property. Pavel is known as a reputable scientist and has been conducting research in the fields of fluorescent photosensitive glasses and glass-ceramics for many years.

The idea is based on glass-ceramic discs and laser diodes to record information inside the virtual layers of a CD-sized fluorescent photosensitive glass via 40nm-wide lasers. The layers are said to be 700nm apart - but we don't know how many layers per disc - and data access is said to occur at DVD-like speed. Storex claims a 5,000 year life for the disks, but this is merely a theoretical estimate since there is no physical product available for testing. The technology is still in the earliest stages of development and it may be a long wait before we see the concept in action.

With so many failed attempts to bring holographic disk drives to the market, we sincerely hope this concept doesn't fade into oblivion like the rest.

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AMD Processors Continue to Dominate Top500 Supercomputers

If you recall last year, the Jaguar Cray XT5 Supercomputer topped the list as the worlds fastest supercomputer utilizing six-core AMD Opteron processors. Six months later, AMD continues to hold the reigning spot on the TOP500 Supercomputer List announced just a few days ago at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany. Jaguar continues to be the world's highest performing system featuring nearly a quarter million cores. The Cray XT5 was improved nearly 70% last year and continues to process 1.75 petaflop per second, up from 1.04 in June 2009.

Additional Top 10 systems based on AMD technology are:

#3: Roadrunner - Los Alamos National Labratory: A hybrid system from IBM utilizing BladeCenter cluster technology in conjunction with AMD Opteron processors and has a processing speed of 1.042 petaflops per second.

#4: Kraken - University of Tennesse: A Cray XT5 system similar to Jaguar which peaks at .83 petaflops.

#7: Tianhe-1 - National SuperComputer Center, China: Another hybrid system using ATI Radeon graphics processors from AMD and has a processing speed of .56 petaflops per second.

The number of AMD technology-based Supercomputers on the TOP500 now stands at 51 with systems that can be found across the globe including in Japan, the United Kingdom, Germany, Switzerland, and Norway. AMD technology currently drives more than 4.2 Petaflops of computing power in the TOP10 alone which is used by universities and national labs to conduct research in engineering, finance, climate predictions, and energy efficient designs. In addition, Cray has recently announced plans for its next-generation Cray XE6 supercomputer which will be based on AMD Opteron 6100 Series processors and have the ability to scale to more than 1 million cores.

“Our customers are selecting AMD platforms for supercomputing because they provide the cores, the memory, the power savings and clearly the performance that the world’s leading research institutions require for their ground-breaking work,” said John Fruehe, director, Server and Embedded product marketing at AMD. “AMD has been a leader in delivering the benefits of x86 and open source computing to the HPC community and it will be exciting to see what further advances the AMD Fusion™ family of Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) will bring.”

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