Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Mailing-List: list [EMAIL PROTECTED]; contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] Delivered-To: mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] List-Unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2001 00:12:34 +0100 Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [>Htech] Canadians Test 'Disk Drive' 5,000 Miles In Diameter (((long-time readers will remember))) http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/161735.html By Steven Bonisteel, Newsbytes OTTAWA, ONTARIO, CANADA, 08 Feb 2001, 5:31 PM CST A Canadian group researching advanced networking technology says it is about to test "the world's largest disk drive" - data storage within the light waves of a 5,000-mile fiber- optic loop. Labeled the Wavelength Disk Drive (WDD), the concept promises to provide lightening-fast access to shared data at the same time that it offers a new use for excess bandwidth in optical networks. Bill St. Arnaud, senior director for advanced networks at CANARIE, an Internet research outfit funded in part by the federal government, told Newsbytes that an initial test of a WDD would create several gigabytes of storage within the nationwide fiber backbone known as "CA*net 3." "Today, we use optical networks for point-to-point communication," St. Arnaud said. "You send a (data) packet across and it goes off the end into a computer. What we're doing is putting a packet onto the network and letting it circle continuously around the network. It can got from Vancouver to St. John's (Newfoundland), back to Vancouver ... going around and around the network. With a WDD, he said, "the wavelengths are like tracks on a disk drive, and the routers are like read/write heads." By developing special drivers at the router level, hundreds - even thousands - of computers could access the same data simultaneously without the kind of bottleneck generated when data is served up from a single point on a network. St. Arnaud said the technology appears surprisingly simple to enable on existing optical networks. Currently, packets of data transmitted on the networks are stamped with a sort of expiry date that ensures they don't live forever on the Net. Enabling a WDD involves extending that "good-'til" date and connecting equipment to the optical network that can access and manage the virtual storage. The ideal application for WDDs, St. Arnaud said, is the distributed-computing - or peer-to-peer - model being adopted by both supercomputer centers and, at the lower end, by projects such as SETI@home's volunteer search for extraterrestrial life. But before Napster fans start picturing a light-speed cache of MP3 files ready for plucking from global network backbones, a paper on WDD published by CANARIE cautions that the total storage currently available on optical networks is limited when compared to the storage available even on home PCs. In addition to the number of wavelengths available in the optical network, the storage capacity is influenced by the network's length. CANARIE says its Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) network is 5,000 miles long. That means it takes just over 100 milliseconds for a packet of data to circle the entire network. It's that latency that determines how much data can be packed into the same wavelength. In the case of the CA*net network, eight wavelengths - with each wavelength accepting data at a rate of 10 gigabits (that's bits) per second - could store 10 gigabytes (that's bytes) of data, CANARIE said. While local metropolitan optical networks are generally too short to be effective storage platforms, CANARIE suggested that WDDs on such fiber loops could be connected to national networks to create much larger capacity. "For several years, researchers have recognized that harnessing the computing power of thousands of personal computers connected to the Internet would provide more computing power than even the largest super computers," said Andrew Bjerring, president and chief executive officer of CANARIE. "This innovative project is intended to address one of the challenges inherent in realizing this dream: the difficulty of sharing large amounts of data efficiently among thousands of computers, each trying to communicate with the others." More information on CANARIE's WDD project is available here: http://www.canet3.net/library/papers.html Reported by Newsbytes.com, http://www.newsbytes.com 17:31 CST Reposted 21:30 CST (20010208/Press contact: Andre Mongeon, for CANARIE, 613-76-2044 /WIRES TOP, ONLINE, TELECOM, PC/SPEEDACCESS.JPG/PHOTO) -----BEGIN TRANSHUMANTECH SIGNATURE----- Post message: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] List owner: [EMAIL PROTECTED] List home: http://www.egroups.com/community/transhumantech/ Alt archive: http://www.planetx.com/majordomo/transhumantech/ Old archive: http://www.planetx.com/transhumantech/threads.html -----END TRANSHUMANTECH SIGNATURE----- == Unsubscribe instructions: http://www.talkspace.net/mlists/setiathome.html This list sponsored by talkspace.net: building space communities online. Mailing list services provided by klx.communications -- www.klx.com
