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IBM has found a way to store data on a single atom
- ksec 10y agoFinally we can test the limit of ZFS. /s
- gbrown_ 10y agoOnly "/s" as this remains a "Boil the oceans" problem ;) https://blogs.oracle.com/bonwick/entry/128_bit_storage_are_you https://blogs.oracle.com/bonwick/entry/128_bit_storage_are_y...
- dredmorbius 10y agoThis is IBM: https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/bshytzp0on1dfvjdfw4-vq https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/bshytzp0on1dfvjdfw4-vq
- mrfusion 10y agoI like the idea of storing information by using two stable isotopes of carbon into a diamond. It would last a long time and be extremely compact. Has anyone looked into that?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- adrianN 10y agoHow would you read that information?
- mrfusion 10y agoI guess that's what they have to work out. You could do graphene instead and then just read it out row by row?
- marcosdumay 10y agoPush something other than carbon there and it will be much easier to read¹, without sacrificing any reasonable² amount of shelf life. 1 - If you do it with a surface, there's commercial tech available for reading it. But you'll still have to develop the entire writing stack. 2 - For a "my info is secure for N times longer than the Universe will take to get into heat death" you'll get a smaller N.
- michaelmwangi 10y agoThis very much reminds me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSCX78-8-q0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSCX78-8-q0 which they did a couple of year ago
- Kattywumpus 10y agoAtom storage has been done before by others. This example at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 2002 comes to mind: http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/2002/080702/Ultimate_memory_demoed_080702.html http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/2002/080702/Ultimate_memory_de...
- Rampoina 10y agoHow is the single atom isolated? And how can you make sure there's only one?
- tcpekin 10y agoThe atoms are manipulated by a scanning tunneling microscope [1], which allows you to both image and manipulate single atoms, as shown in the movie "A Boy and His Atom" [2], also made by IBM. You can make sure there's only one by just taking an image at a resolution high enough to see single atoms. This is fundamentally a scanning technique. A very sharp tip, down to a few atoms at the point, sometimes capped with a single carbon nanotube, is scanned across the surface of whatever sample you have, which for a measurement like this, must be almost atomically flat. A bias is applied between the sample and the tip, and quantum tunnelling can allow for electrons to move between the sample and the tip. This current can then be measured, and correlated with sample height or electronic properties of the sample. If you scanning step size is less than that of the size of an atom, you can then image single atoms by detecting the change in current due to a different species of atom, or due to the change in height between your flat surface and tip when an atom is sticking out of the top of the surface. To manipulate the atoms, the tip is moved close enough to an adatom that it begins to form a weak bond with the tip. The tip then can move and essentially drag the adatom with it to wherever the researchers want. [3] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanning_tunneling_microscope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanning_tunneling_microscope [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Boy_and_His_Atom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Boy_and_His_Atom [3] https://www.nist.gov/programs-projects/atom-manipulation-scanning-tunneling-microscope https://www.nist.gov/programs-projects/atom-manipulation-sca...
- awinter-py 10y agoCouple of years ago a japanese team used an iodine atom to compute a fourier transform. The computation was faster than a computer but the ETL was super slow. IBM has been pushing stuff around with a tunneling microscope for decades. It's cool but the press should report the transfer rate.
- fred_is_fred 10y agothe atom was then given 30 days to move to a "core" molecule.
- kator 10y ago800 Petabyte Hard Disks for sale?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- adtac 10y agoIs that like a theoretical limit or are is it just a big number?
- kevinSuttle 10y agoYet, can't handle figure out a way to support remote employees.
- dang 10y agoWould you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to HN?
- Grangar 10y agoBitter much?
- kevinSuttle 10y agoYeah, actually. I am.
- parthdesai 10y agoI'm pretty sure you can't work from home at IBM anymore, which is a bummer in today's world.
- abakker 10y agoYou definitely can - I know that many of them still do. However, I'm not sure how many people do this 100% of the time.
- trapperkeeper79 10y agoIBM's policy seems to have changed recently. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/02/08/ibm_no_more_telecommuting/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/02/08/ibm_no_more_telecom...
- otoburb 10y agoFrom your article: "IBM has spent the past couple of years undertaking a massive turnaround effort to transition from its servers and services business model to one focused more on cloud, security, analytics, and mobile. That turnaround has brought with it thousands of job cuts." While it's obvious that IBM is trying to cross the same CASM (cloud, security, analytics and mobile[1]) as their "West Coast competitors", I'm glad that IBM is still investing in basic research as per the OP submission. [1] https://dupress.deloitte.com/dup-us-en/deloitte-review/issue-14/dr14-democratizing-technology.html https://dupress.deloitte.com/dup-us-en/deloitte-review/issue...
- hermitdev 10y agoThings like this were partially why I got interested in electrical engineering & physics. Sadly, 15 years later, my career deviated to financial software, but I still find articles & progressions like these fascinating.
- gnarbarian 10y agoIt's not too late if you're willing to take a pay cut.
- hermitdev 10y agoUnfortunately, I've lost a lot of my EE knowledge due to mental atrophy.
- georgeburdell 10y agoYou'd be surprised how quickly it comes back. I recently had to design a simple ~50 node circuit after ~10 years of not doing anything of the sort, and I had it simulated in SPICE and prototyped after maybe 10 hours of work over a few days.
- hwillis 10y agoWe had to learn SPICE in my ECE program. I found that inexplicable- writing a circuit in SPICE is like using a slide rule. I can derive a circuit on paper (just as I can do math), and I can use an actual circuit analyzer (just as I can use a calculator). Knowing the foundations of simulation programs is justifiable, but using and practicing with them is just excessive. As the circuits got more complex, I "cheated" by using a script to generate netlists and eventually I just used LTSPICE because christ, I have better things to do than type until my fingerprints wear smooth.
- mikenew 10y agoCan we stop measuring data storage in units of 'song'?
- marcosdumay 10y agoYes, keep the old trend and standardize on a certain symphony.
- zem 10y agowhy? for those who know how big a song is, you can easily translate. for those who have no idea but roughly know how many songs their music players can hold it is a far more meaningful measure than units of 'bit'
- KeytarHero 10y agoAre we talking 2-minute punk songs, 4-minute pop songs, or 20-minute jazz-prog odysseys? And is this CD quality wav, or 128 kbps mp3?
- function_seven 10y ago4 minutes. A typical length for a song.
- ars 10y agoAnd for those like me, who don't know either of those things, can you please translate into bytes?
- a012 10y agoMaybe a few decades from now, our children will look at photos of 10MB HDD, 8TB HDD, then 8PiB HDD then have a smile how technology evolve.
- GordonS 10y agoAs a child (showing my age here) I remember getting a 20MB HDD for our desktop machine (might have been an Olivetti with a 286 CPU, I don't remember). At the time, that seemed an incredible amount of storage - "how will I ever fill that", I thought!
- dahart 10y ago> a single atom of the element holmium carefully placed on a surface of magnesium oxide. A special-purpose microscope uses a tiny amount of electrical current to flip the atom's orientation one way or the other, corresponding to writing a 1 or 0. The researchers then read the data by measuring the atom's electromagnetic properties. I'm not sure I could have recalled the existence of the element holmium, I've never heard or read much about it. I looked it up, and found the likely reason it was used for this research: "Holmium has the highest magnetic permeability of any element and therefore is used for the polepieces of the strongest static magnets." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holmium https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holmium I don't know if we'll see practical atomic storage or if more than one bit per atom is physically possible, but in theory there's enough space in an atom to hold millions of bits. But I think you have to get to black hole density... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bekenstein_bound https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bekenstein_bound
- mgalka 10y agoWhat about quantum effects? I thought at that scale it would be a qbit.
- jacquesm 10y ago> I don't know if we'll see practical atomic storage or if more than one bit per atom is physically possible, but in theory there's enough space in an atom to hold millions of bits. What will you encode the bits with?
- reikonomusha 10y agoI think he means that physical space could accommodate such number of bits before a black hole forms, not that we can tame an atom specifically to hold that information.
- chias 10y agoI thought he meant that you could encode more than one of two states. For a very base analogy, instead of just - and | representing 1 and 0, you could have - \ | / representing 00, 01, 10, 11, etc. Wifi does something similar with signal phase.
- alanbernstein 10y agoThere's plenty of room at the bottom, after all...
- ladytron 10y agoUpvote for Feynman, always
- ankurdhama 10y agoStorage medium is just part of the equation. The other important and hard part is the mechanism that is required to read and write data to that medium. Would you use a CD as a storage medium when the CD reader/writer is size of a washing machine?
- erikj 10y agoWell, there were minicomputer disk drives: http://i.imgur.com/7VVFXEg.jpg http://i.imgur.com/7VVFXEg.jpg
- dahart 10y ago> Would you use a CD as a storage medium when the CD reader/writer is size of a washing machine? Yes, according to history, if that's all anyone had. :) IBM's project might be the ENIAC of molecular storage devices. Only time will tell. Keep in mind your example doesn't go far enough to match past history, we used to actually have much worse than 600MB / washing machine. We used to have 100 words / warehouse. "By the end of its operation in 1955, ENIAC contained 17,468 vacuum tubes, 7200 crystal diodes, 1500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors and approximately 5,000,000 hand-soldered joints. It weighed more than 30 short tons (27 t), was roughly 2.4m × 0.9m × 30m (8 × 3 × 100 feet) in size, occupied 167m2 (1800 ft2) and consumed 150 kW of electricity." "In 1953, a 100-word magnetic-core memory built by the Burroughs Corporation was added to ENIAC" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC * EDIT: It'd be more fair to use punch cards as ENIAC's storage mechanism to compare against, and punch cards held a lot more than 100 words. Anyway, still, crazy by today's standards, right?
- Arizhel 10y agoTo be fair, there's a difference between long-term storage and working memory. The magnetic-core memory you're talking about is RAM, not storage. Though it is looking like the two may converge some time in the future, until now "working memory" (RAM) in computers has always been far lower-density than storage, but far faster, for use in computations (and also volatile, unlike storage which is non-volatile). It's the equivalent of comparing your brain's short-term memory (when thinking about a problem) to your hand-written notes. Punch cards are indeed the appropriate comparison. But to get back to your original point, a washing-machine-sized storage machine is perfectly acceptable if that's all your technology allows. In fact, it'd even be acceptable now, if it allowed you to replace what currently takes a whole data center's worth of hard drives. I'm sure Google would be ecstatic if they could store all of YouTube on a single machine the size of a washing machine.
- nol13 10y agoIf there's an atom there, it's a 1?
- Sanddancer 10y agoMagnetic orientation, probably. Elsethread, it was mentioned that they used Holmium, which is the most magnetically reactive element.
- visarga 10y agoThis website is a piece of shit. It autostarts a second video off screen even after I swatted the first one that popped on the right, covering the text of the article.
- nickpeterson 10y agoIs a piece better or worse than a pile, I'm not familiar with the unit conversions.