RayOnStorage - Part 2

12 atoms per bit vs 35 bits per electron

Posted on January 17, 2012 by Ray

Shows 6 atom pairs in a row, with coloration of blue for interstitial space and yellow for external facets of the atom

from Technology Review Article

Read a story today in Technology Review on Magnetic Memory Miniaturized to Just 12 Atoms by a team at IBM Research that created a (spin) magnetic “storage device” that used 12 iron atoms to record a single bit (near absolute zero and just for a few hours). The article said it was about 100X denser than the previous magnetic storage record.

Holographic storage beats that

Wikipedia’s (soon to go dark for 24hrs) article on Memory Storage Density mentioned research at Stanford that in 2009 created an electronic quantum holographic device that stored 35 bits/electron using a sheet of copper atoms to record the letters S and U.

The Wikipedia article went on to equate 35bits/electron to ~3 Exabytes[10**18 bytes]/In**2. (Although, how Wikipedia was able to convert from bits/electron to EB/in**2 I don’t know but I’ll accept it as a given)

Now an iron atom has 26 electrons and copper has 29 electrons. If 35 bits/electron is 3 EB/in**2 (or ~30Eb/in**2), then 1 bit per 12 iron atoms (or 12*26=312 electrons) should be 0.0032bits/electron or ~275TB/in**2 (or ~2.8Pb/in**2). Not quite to the scale of the holographic device but interesting nonetheless.

What can that do for my desktop?

Given that today’s recording head/media has demonstrated ~3.3Tb/in**2 (see our Disk drive density multiplying by 6X post), the 12 atoms per bit is a significant advance for (spin) magnetic storage.

With today’s disk industry shipping 1TB/disk platters using ~0.6Tb/in**2 (see our Disk capacity growing out of sight post), these technologies, if implemented in a disk form factor, could store from 4.6PB to 50EB in a 3.5″ form factor storage device.

So there is a limit to (spin) magnetic storage and it’s about 11000X larger than holographic storage. Once again holographic storage proves it can significantly store more data than magnetic storage if only it could be commercialized. (Probably a subject to cover in a future post.)

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I don’t know about you but 4.6PB drive is probably more than enough storage for my lifetime and then some. But then again those new 4K High Definition videos, may take up a lot more space than my (low definition) DVD collection.

Comments?

ESRP v3 (Exchange 2010) log playback results, 1Kmbox&under – chart-of-the-month

Posted on January 12, 2012 by Ray

(SCIESRP111029-003) (c) 2011 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

The above chart is from our last Exchange [2010] Solution Review Program (ESRP) performance dispatch released in our October newsletter (sign-up upper right). The 1K mailbox and under category for ESRP represents Exchange storage solutions for SMB data centers.

As one can see from the above the NetApp FAS2040 has done well but an almost matching result came in from the HP P2000 G3 MSA system. What’s not obvious here is that the FAS2040 had 8 disks and the P2000 had 78 so there was quite a difference in the spindle counts. The #3&4 runs from EMC VNXe3100 also posted respectable results (within 1sec of top performer) and only had 5 and 7 disks respectively, so they were much more inline with the FAS2040 run. The median number of drives for this category is 8 drives which probably makes sense for SMB storage solutions.

Why log playback

I have come to prefer a few metrics in the Exchange 2010 arena that seem to me to capture a larger part of the information available from an ESRP report. The Log Playback metric is one of them that seems to me to fit the bill nicely. Specifically:

It doesn’t depend on the Jetstress IO/rate parameter that impacts the database transfers per second rate. The log playback is just the average time it takes to playback a 1MB log file against a database.
It is probably a clear indicator of how well a storage system (configured matching the ESRP) can support DAG log processing.

In addition, I believe Log Playback is a great stand-in for any randomized database transaction processing. Now I know that Exchange is not necessarily a pure relational database but it does have a significant component of indexes, tables, and sequentiality to it.

My problem is that there doesn’t seem to be any other real database performance benchmark out there for storage. I know that TPC has a number of benchmarks tailored to database transaction activity but these seem to be more a measure of the database server than the storage. SPC-2 has some database oriented queries but it’s generally focused on through put and doesn’t really represent randomized database activity and for other reasons it’s not as highly used as SPC-1 or ESRP so there is not as much data to report on.

That leaves ESRP. For whatever reason (probably the popularity of Exchange), almost everyone submits for ESRP. Which makes it ripe for product comparisons.

Also, there are a number of other good metrics in ESRP results that I feel have general applicability outside Exchange as well. I will be reporting on them in future posts.

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Comments?

Sorry, I haven’t been keeping up with our chart-of-the-month posts, but I promise to do better in the future. I plan to be back in synch with our newsletter dispatches before month end.

The full ESRP performance report for the 1K and under mailbox category went out to our newsletter subscriber’s last October. A copy of the full report will be up on the dispatches page of our website sometime this month (if all goes well). However, you can get performance information now and subscribe to future newsletters to receive these reports even earlier by just sending us an email or using the signup form above right.

For a more extensive discussion of block storage performance in ESRP (top 20) and SPC-1&-2 (top 30) results please consider purchasing our recently updated SAN Storage Buying Guide available on our website.

As always, we welcome any suggestions on how to improve our analysis of ESRP results or any of our other storage system performance discussions.

Posted in Block Storage, Storage performance, System effectiveness | Tagged 1K-and-under mbx, Chart of the month, database performance, EMC VNXe3100, ESRP, Exchange performance, Exchange Solution Reviewed Pro, HP P2000 G3 MSA, Log playback, Microsoft Exchange, NetApp FAS2040 | Leave a comment

Mapping the brain

Posted on January 10, 2012 by Ray

Charles Bell: Anatomy of the Brain, c. 1802 by brain_blogger (cc) (From Flickr)

Read an interesting piece today on MIT News titled Patterns of connections reveal brain functions. The article was mostly about how scientists there had managed to identify brain functionality by mapping the connections it had to other parts of the brain.

They had determined that facial recognition functionality could be recognized just by the connections it had to the rest of the brain. But that’s not what I found interesting.

Seeing connections in living brains

By using MRIs and diffusion-weighted imaging (applying MRI magnetic fields in many different directions and detecting water flow) they can now identify connections between locations within a living brain. I suppose this has been going on for quite a while now but this is the first I have heard about it.

The article didn’t mention the granularity of the connections they were able to detect, but presumably this would get better over time as MRI’s became more detailed. Could they concievably identify a single synapse or neuron to neuron connection? Could they identify the synapse’s connection strength or almost as important its positive or negative gain?

Technology to live forever

Ray Kurzweil predicted that in the near future, science would be able to download a living brain into a computer and by doing so an “individual” could live forever in “virtual life”. One of the first steps in this process is the ability to read out neural connections. Of course we would need more than just connections alone, but mapping is a first step.

Together with mapping brains and neuromorphic computing advances coming from IBM and MIT labs, we could conceivably do something like what Anders Sandgren and Nick Bostrom described in their Whole Brain Emulation paper. But even with a detailed, highly accurate map of neurons and synapses, the cognitive computing elements available today are not yet ready to emulate a whole brain – thank God.

Other uses

I am little frightened to think of the implications of such brain mapping capabilities. Not to mention the ability to read connections in living brains could potentially be used to read connections in deceased (presumably preserved) brains just as well.

Would such a device be able to emulate a person’s brain enough to be able to extract secrets – gives brain washing a whole new meaning. Probably, at a minimum, such technology could provide an infinitely better lie detector.

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Another step on the road to the singularity.

Comments?

Posted in Cognitive computing | Tagged Brain scanning, Cognitive computing, neuromorphic computing, Singularity | Leave a comment

New wireless technology augmenting data center cabling

Posted on December 20, 2011 by Ray

1906 Patent for Wireless Telegraphy by Wesley Fryer (cc) (from Flickr)

I read a report today in Technology Review about how Bouncing data would speed up data centers, which talked about using wireless technology and special ceiling tiles to create dedicated data links between servers. The wireless signal was in the 60Ghz range and would yield something on the order of couple of Gb per second.

The cable mess

Wireless could solve a problem evident to anyone that has looked under data center floor tiles today – cabling. Underneath our data centers today there is a spaghetti-like labyrinth of cables connecting servers to switches to storage and back again. The amount of cables underneath some data centers is so deep and impenetrable that some shops don’t even try to extract old cables when replacing equipment just leaving them in place and layering on new ones as the need arises.

Bouncing data around a data center

The nice thing about the new wireless technology is that you can easily set up a link between two servers (or servers and switches) by just properly positioning antenna and ceiling tiles, without needing any cables. However, in order to increase bandwidth and reduce interference the signal has to be narrowly focused which makes the technology point-to-point, requiring line of sight between the end points. But with signal bouncing ceiling tiles, a “line-of-sight” pathway could readily be created around the data center.

This could easily be accomplished by different shaped ceiling tiles such as pyramids, flat panels, or other geometric configurations that would guide the radio signal to the correct transceiver.

I see it all now, the data center of the future would have its ceiling studded with geometrical figures protruding below the tiles, providing wave guides for wireless data paths, routing the signals around obstacles to its final destination.

Probably other questions remain.

It appears the technology can only support 4 channels per stream. Which means it might not scale up to much beyond current speeds.
Electromagnetic radiation is something most IT equipment tries to eliminate rather than transmit. Having something generate and receive radio waves in a data center may require different equipment regulations and having those types of signals bouncing around a data center may make proper shielding more of a concern..
Signaling interference is a real problem which might make routing these signals even more of a problem than routing cables. Which is why I believe they need some sort of multi-directional wireless switching equipment might help.

In the report, there wasn’t any discussion as to the energy costs of the wireless technology and that may be another issue to consider. However, any reduction in cabling can only help IT labor costs which are a major factor in today’s data center economics.

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It’s just in investigation stages now but Intel, IBM and others are certainly thinking about how wireless technology could help the data centers of tomorrow reduce costs, clutter and cables.

All this gives a whole new meaning to top of rack switching.

Comments?

Posted in Distributed computing, Networking, System quality, Wireless | Tagged Ceiling tiles, Data center, data transmission, IBM, Intel, radio channels, Wireless data center connections | Leave a comment

Analog neural simulation or digital neuromorphic computing vs. AI

Posted on December 15, 2011 by Ray

DSC_9051 by Greg Gorman (cc) (from Flickr)

At last week’s IBM Smarter Computing Forum we had a session on Watson, IBM’s artificial intelligence machine which won Jeopardy last year and another session on IBM sponsored research helping to create the SyNAPSE digital neuromorphic computing chip.

Putting “Watson to work”

Apparently, IBM is taking Watson’s smarts and applying it to health care and other information intensive verticals (intelligence, financial services, etc.). At the conference IBM had Monoj Saxena, senior director Watson Solutions and Dr. Herbert Chase, a professor of clinical medicine a senior medical professor from Columbia School of Medicine come up and talk about Watson in healthcare.

Mr. Saxena’s contention and Dr. Chase concurred that Watson can play at important part in helping healthcare apply current knowledge. Watson’s core capability is the ability to ingest and make sense of information and then be able to apply that knowledge. In this case, using medical research knowledge to help diagnose patient problems.

Dr. Chase had been struck at a young age by one patient that had what appeared to be an incurable and unusual disease. He was an intern at the time and was given the task to diagnose her issue. Eventually, he was able to provide a proper diagnosis but it irked him that it took so long and so many doctors to get there.

So as a test of Watson’s capabilities, Dr. Chase input this person’s medical symptoms into Watson and it was able to provide a list of potential diagnosises. Sure enough, Watson did list the medical problem the patient actually had those many years ago.

At the time, I mentioned to another analyst that Watson seemed to represent the end game of artificial intelligence. Almost a final culmination and accumulation of 60 years in AI research, creating a comprehensive service offering for a number of verticals.

That’s all great, but it’s time to move on.

SyNAPSE is born

In the next session IBM had Dr. Dharmenrad Modta come up and talk about their latest SyNAPSE chip, a new neueromorphic digital silicon chip that mimicked the brain to model neurological processes.

We are quite a ways away from productization of the SyNAPSE chip. Dr. Modha showed us a real-time exhibition of the SyNAPSE chip in action (connected to his laptop) with it interpreting a handwritten numeral into it’s numerical representation. I would say it’s a bit early yet, to see putting “SyNAPSE to work”.

Digital vs. analog redux

I have written about the SyNAPSE neuromorphic chip and a competing technology, the direct analog simulation of neural processes before (see IBM introduces SyNAPSE chip and MIT builds analog synapse chip). In the MIT brain chip post I discussed the differences between the two approaches focusing on the digital vs. analog divide.

It seems that IBM research is betting on digital neuromorphic computing. At the Forum last week, I had a discussion with a senior exec in IBM’s STG group, who said that the history of electronic computing over the last half century or so has been mostly about the migration from analog to digital technologies.

Yes, but that doesn’t mean that digital is better, just more easy to produce.

On that topic, I asked the Dr. Modha, on what he thought of MIT’s analog brain chip. He said

MIT’s brain chip was built on 180nm fabrication processes whereas his is on 45nm or over 3X finer. Perhaps the fact that IBM has some of the best fab’s in the world may have something to do with this.
The digital SyNAPSE chip can potentially operate at 5.67Ghz and will be absolutely faster than any analog brain simulation. Yes, but each analog simulated neuron is actually one of a parallel processing complex and with a 1’000 or a million of them operating even 1000X or million X slower it’s should be able to keep up.
The digital SyNAPSE chip was carefully designed to be complementary to current digital technology. As I look at IT today we are surrounded by analog devices that interface very well with the digital computing environment, so I don’t think this will be a problem when we are ready to use it.

Analog still surrounds us and defines the real world. Someday the computing industry will awaken from it’s digital hobby horse and somehow see the truth in that statement.

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In any case, if it takes another 60 years to productize one of these technologies then the Singularity is farther away than I thought, somewhere around 2071 should about do it.

Comments?

Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive computing, IBM SyNAPSE chip, IBM Watson, MIT analog brain chip | Tagged AI, analog vs. digital, Healthcare, IBM, IBM Research, Medical diagnosis, MIT, Singularity | 2 Comments

Making hardware-software systems design easier

Posted on December 13, 2011 by Ray

Exposed by AMagill (cc) (from Flickr)

Recent research from MIT on a Streamlining Chip Design was in the news today. The report described work was done by Nyrav Dave PhD and Myron King to create a new programming language, BlueSpec that can convert specifications into hardware chip design (Verilog) or compile it into software programming (C++).

BlueSpec designers can tag (annotate) system modules to be hardware or software. The intent of the project is to make it easier to decide what is done in hardware versus software. By specifying this decision using a language attribute, it should make architectural hardware-software tradeoffs much easier to do and as a result, delay that decision until much later in the development cycle.

Hardware-software tradeoffs

Making good hardware-software tradeoffs are especially important in mobile handsets where power efficiency and system performance requirements often clash. It’s not that unusual in these systems that functionality is changed from hardware to software implementations or vice versa.

The problem is that the two different implementations (hardware or software) use different design languages and would typically require a complete re-coding effort to change, delaying system deployment significantly. Which makes such decisions all the more important to get right early on in system architecture.

In contrast, with BlueSpec, all it would take is a different tag to have the language translate the module into Verilog (chip design language) or C++ (software code).

Better systems through easier hardware design

There is a long running debate around commodity hardware versus special purpose hardware designed systems in storage systems (see Commodity Hardware Always Loses and Commodity Hardware Debate Heats-up Again). We believe that there will continuing place for special purpose built hardware in storage. Also, I would go on to say this is likely the case in networking, server systems as well as telecommunications handsets/back-office equipment.

The team at MIT specifically created their language to help create more efficient mobile phone hand sets. But from my perspective it has an equally valid part to play in storage and other systems.

Hardware and software design, more similar than different

Nowadays, hardware and software designers are all just coders using different languages.

Yes hardware engineers have more design constraints and have to deal with the real, physical world of electronics. But what they deal with most, is a hardware design language and design verification tools tailored for their electronic design environment.

Doing hardware design is not that much different from software developers coding in a specific language like C++ or Java. Software coders must also be able to understand their framework/virtual machine/OS environment their code operates in to produce something that works. Perhaps, design verification tools don’t work or even exist in software as much as they should but that is more a subject for research than a distinction between the two types of designers.

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Whether BlueSpec is the final answer or not isn’t as interesting as the fact that it has taken a first step to unify system design. Being able to decide much later in the process whether to make a module hardware or software will benefit all system designers and should get products out with less delay. But getting hardware designers and software coders talking more, using the same language to express their designs can’t help but result in better/tighter integrated designs which end up benefiting the world.

Comments?

Posted in Decision making, Energy efficiency, R&D measures, Storage architecture, Strategic Inflection Points, System effectiveness | Tagged BlueSpec, C++, Commodity hardware, Design language, Design tradeoffs, Hardware-software design, special purpose hardware, Verilog | Leave a comment

How has IBM research changed?

Posted on December 7, 2011 by Ray

IBM Neuromorphic Chip (from Wired story)

What does Watson, Neuromorphic chips and race track memory have in common. They have all emerged out of IBM research labs.

I have been wondering for some time now how it is that a company known for it’s cutting edge research but lack of product breakthrough has transformed itself into an innovation machine.

There has been a sea change in the research at IBM that is behind the recent productization of tecnology.

Talking the past couple of days with various IBMers at STGs Smarter Computing Forum, I have formulate a preliminary hypothesis.

At first I heard that there was a change in the way research is reviewed for product potential. Nowadays, it almost takes a business case for research projects to be approved and funded. And the business case needs to contain a plan as to how it will eventually reach profitability for any project.

In the past it was often said that IBM invented a lot of technology but productized only a little of it. Much of their technology would emerge in other peoples products and IBM would not recieve anything for their efforts (other than some belated recognition for their research contribution).

Nowadays, its more likely that research not productized by IBM is at least licensed from them after they have patented the crucial technologies that underpin the advance. But it’s just as likely if it has something to do with IT, the project will end up as a product.

One executive at STG sees three phases to IBM research spanning the last 50 years or so.

Phase I The ivory tower:

IBM research during the Ivory Tower Era looked a lot like research universities but without the tenure of true professorships. Much of the research of this era was in materials and pure mathematics.

I suppose one example of this period was Mandlebrot and fractals. It probably had a lot of applications but little of them ended up in IBM products and mostly it advanced the theory and practice of pure mathematics/systems science.

Such research had little to do with the problems of IT or IBM’s customers. The fact that it created pretty pictures and a way of seeing nature in a different light was an advance to mankind but it didn’t have much if any of an impact to IBM’s bottom line.

Phase II Joint project teams

In IBM research’s phase II, the decision process on which research to move forward on now had people from not just IBM research but also product division people. At least now there could be a discussion across IBM’s various divisions on how the technology could enhance customer outcomes. I am certain profitability wasn’t often discussed but at least it was no longer purposefully ignored.

I suppose over time these discussions became more grounded in fact and business cases rather than just the belief in the value of the research for research sake. Technological roadmaps and projects were now looked at from how well they could impact customer outcomes and how such technology enabled new products and solutions to come to market.

Phase III Researchers and product people intermingle

The final step in IBM transformation of research involved the human element. People started moving around.

Researchers were assigned to the field and to product groups and product people were brought into the research organization. By doing this, ideas could cross fertilize, applications could be envisioned and the last finishing touches needed by new technology could be envisioned, funded and implemented. This probably led to the most productive transition of researchers into product developers.

On the flip side when researchers returned back from their multi-year product/field assignments they brought a new found appreciation of problems encountered in the real world. That combined with their in depth understanding of where technology could go helped show the path that could take research projects into new more fruitful (at least to IBM customers) arenas. This movement of people provided the final piece in grounding research in areas that could solve customer problems.

In the end, many research projects at IBM may fail but if they succeed they have the potential to make change IT as we know it.

I heard today that there were 700 to 800 projects in IBM research today if any of them have the potential we see in the products shown today like Watson in Healthcare and Neuromorphic chips, exciting times are ahead.

Posted in Corporate growth, Data science, Executive leadership, Information economy, R&D measures, SSD storage, Strategic Inflection Points, Strategic planning, Strategy, Visionary leadershp | Tagged IBM Research, IBM Smarter Computing Forum, Neuromorphic chips, Project management, racetrack memory, Research management, Watson | 1 Comment

RayOnStorage Blog

12 atoms per bit vs 35 bits per electron

Holographic storage beats that

What can that do for my desktop?

ESRP v3 (Exchange 2010) log playback results, 1Kmbox&under – chart-of-the-month

Why log playback

Mapping the brain

Seeing connections in living brains

Technology to live forever

Other uses

Top 10 blog posts for 2011