5 ms·
I'm eventually foreseeing a whole new form of cache. A coil of optical fiber with the cache data constantly inflight around that loop. With denser optical dat
by Zenst 4y ago
I'm eventually foreseeing a whole new form of cache. A coil of optical fiber with the cache data constantly inflight around that loop. With denser optical data transmissions the amount of data per meter of coil starts increasing.
At this speed, we are already talking 2% of the entire Internet traffic in the length of a single fiber between the shortest point between the UK and USA. That's just a single fiber. As transducers of this ability get cheaper and cheaper, all those unused dark fibers start to offer up alternative uses with inflight-caches. Think of how much memory would be needed to store that amount of data, how much that costs and even with the costs of fiber, things would start.
- achr2 4y agoEverything old is new again - delay line memory at the speed of light.
- colechristensen 4y ago1/1.4 * the speed of light :) Moves a bit slower in glass fiber.
- adgjlsfhk1 4y agoif you want to be pedantic, it is the speed of light. Just not the speed of light in vacuum :)
- Dylan16807 4y agoI don't really agree. If you say "the" speed of light and don't make other qualifications, that means c.
- WASDx 4y agoReminds me of https://github.com/yarrick/pingfs https://github.com/yarrick/pingfs
- oefnak 4y agoReminds me of the harderdrive based on the ping protocol: https://youtu.be/JcJSW7Rprio https://youtu.be/JcJSW7Rprio
- richardwhiuk 4y agoReminds me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8BcCLLX4N4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8BcCLLX4N4
- p1mrx 4y agoEven at 1.84 Pbps, you can only store about a gigabyte per km, so this doesn't seem very practical. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=1.84Pbps+*+1km+%2F+c https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=1.84Pbps+*+1km+%2F+c
- porbelm 4y agoFiber Token Ring?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- hinkley 4y agoYou wouldn’t want fiber though. It’s designed with low latency in mind, whereas for a delay line you want high latency (but not too high).
- fellerts 4y agoYou can technically do this today. Just target a remote server and run pingfs. Store your data in the transatlantic fibres! https://github.com/yarrick/pingfs https://github.com/yarrick/pingfs
- throwawaylinux 4y ago225 terabytes in 1 second of fiber. 225TB of DRAM doesn't actually cost all that much, O(million), or maybe O(10 million) if you're also talking the servers required to drive that much. Ping between USA and EU might be what, 100ms round trip? So how much would you think 20x spools of transatlantic fiber plus all the repeaters and power to run it will cost you? And for that you get a memory with O(1s) latency as opposed to DRAM which is 10 million times better latency. Or you could go with NAND for about twenty thousand dollars for that much storage with only 1 million times better latency. Or HDD at a few thousand and still get 100x better latency. Maybe my math is wrong, but I'm not quite seeing the niche for this new form of slow billion dollar cache.
- WithinReason 4y agoNot sure if this is relevant: In 2004, researchers at UC Berkeley first demonstrated slow light in a semiconductor, with a group velocity 9.6 kilometers per second.[5] Hau and her colleagues later succeeded in stopping light completely, and developed methods by which it can be stopped and later restarted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_light https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_light