A giant leap for magnetic media
Beyond magnetic media
Calendar courtesy
Tighter security on the way
Error correction's new era
LABNOTES:
Thanks for the (video) memories
Tops in OPS research
A giant leap for magnetic media
A magnetic hard disk developed by IBM
Storage Systems Division in collaboration with IBM Research has set a new record for data
storage: 35.3 billion bits (gigabits) per square inch. That's a 75 percent increase over
the 20 gigabit milestone IBM achieved earlier
this year.
The advance was enabled largely by the development of a new metal-alloy disk coating.
The alloy overcomes a problem that arises as bits are made smaller: their tendency to lose
their magnetic orientation over time (see cover story, "Exploring frontier materials".)
Bits written onto the new disk have the same stability as those in disk drives
currently on the market. John Best, vice president of technology at IBM Storage
Systems Division, says disks with the proprietary coating can be manufactured
commercially using
existing equipment.
The new record is expected to lead to disk drives that can store many times more
information than those available today. A single 3.5-inch-diameter platter on a
desktop PC hard-disk drive, for example, would hold nearly 50 gigabytes;
a 2.5-inch disk on a notebook computer's hard-disk drive, more than 20 gigabytes.
Multiply those figures by 10 -- since a single disk drive today may contain as
many as 10 disks -- and some serious storage capacity appears to be on the horizon.
Beyond magnetic media
IBM's data storage record of 35.3 gigabits per square inch, while
impressive for a magnetic hard drive, pales beside the densities that could be achieved with a data storage system called Millipede. Instead of writing bits by magnetizing regions of a disk's surface, Millipede melts tiny indentations into the surface. The system's developers, at IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory, believe their technique will eventually allow storage densities of up to 500 gigabits per square inch (80 gigabits per square centimeter). That's five to ten times the presumed upper limit for magnetic storage.
Millipede is based on Atomic Force Microscopy, a technology invented at Zurich that uses tips mounted on the ends of tiny cantilevers etched in silicon to scan surfaces in minute detail. Millipede's tips -- 1,024 of them, in a 32 x 32 array -- are heated with electric pulses to 750 degrees F (400 degrees C), hot enough to melt the disk's polymer-film surface. The tips leave holes just 30 to 50 nanometers (billionths of a meter) across. Each hole represents a bit.
To read the data, Millipede detects whether a tip is in a hole by taking the cantilever's temperature. "If you're out of the indentation, there will be a bigger gap between tip and storage medium, so there will be less cooling," explains Nobel laureate Gerd Binnig, who works on the project. "When the tip is in an indentation, there will be more cooling, because there is more efficient heat transport from tip to substrate."
While noting the technology's promise, Peter Vettiger, who leads Millipede research at Zurich, stresses that the work is "still in early development." One challenge is to demonstrate that Millipede can read and write data fast enough to be practical.
Calendar courtesy
An ordinary calendar just sits there,
but researchers at IBM's Almaden Research Center are developing an
"active calendar" that anticipates your needs like an English butler.
The system -- which, in prototype, works on top of the Lotus Notes® calendar --
takes its cues from your calendar entries. It then scours your computer and the Web for useful
information. If you've scheduled a meeting with Smiley at XYZ-soft about Gadgetron, the active
calendar will collect information about Smiley (such as phone
numbers and previous email messages), about XYZ-soft (stock value, press
releases, driving directions) and about Gadgetron (relevant Web sites and notes
from previous meetings). If the meeting is out of town, the calendar will list nearby hotels.
All this information is then automatically linked to the calendar entry.
Though designed to work without being prompted, the active calendar can perform special tasks if asked: it can, for example, email your spouse whenever you schedule something late, or update weather information for a destination city.
Tighter security on the way
An IBM data encryption system called MARS
has been named one of five finalists in the contest to design an Advanced Encryption Standard
(AES) for use by the U.S. government. AES will be a faster, more secure successor to IBM's
Data Encryption Standard (DES), which the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
adopted as the U.S. government standard more than 20 years ago. DES has "withstood all attacks," says David Safford, an encryption expert at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center. Even so, NIST decided in 1996 that DES might be vulnerable to modern computers and issued a call for a more sophisticated encryption code. IBM was among 21 organizations that answered the call. In September, the number was winnowed down to five, including IBM's MARS entry.
The system's name is derived from the mathematical operations it performs to encode data:
multiplication, addition, rotation and S box (the table that substitutes a random value
for an input value).
MARS provides multiple defense walls, like a safe within a safe. "If a safecracker
figures out the combination for the first safe, he then has to figure out a different
combination for the second one," explains Safford. NIST plans to announce the AES
winner late next summer.
Error correction's new era
A team at IBM's Tokyo Research Laboratory has developed a hardware
algorithm that advances the art of computer error-correction codes.
Such codes are important because they detect and correct errors in data
that has been corrupted by electronic noise and other disturbances.
Until now the most powerful error correction codes -- known as Reed-Solomon codes
-- have been too slow for use in routine data processing. As a result, they have
been restricted mainly to applications in which relatively low-speed data processing
is acceptable, such as communications and storage devices, including hard disks and CD-ROMs.
In areas that require rapid processing -- well above a billion bits per second --
less powerful error correction methods known as Hamming codes are used instead.
The Tokyo algorithm, inspired by mathematical techniques used in quantum mechanics,
enables a greater than tenfold speed-up in the decoding of the more advanced Reed-Solomon codes.
By reducing the number of arithmetic circuits required to process encoded data, the algorithm
makes it practical for the codes to run on parallel circuits. The resulting acceleration,
which produces speeds comparable to those of Hamming codes, opens the way for sophisticated
error correction in future computers that will process far more data at far higher speeds.
Besides being fast, the error correction circuit consumes little power when operated at
the speed of conventional decoders, making it suitable for mobile and embedded devices.
Thanks for the (video) memories
Multimedia and the Web would be unthinkable without
computer graphics and the ability to manipulate windows onscreen. Ironically,
these features depend on an innovation whose origins are often overlooked.
Were it not for the invention of the video random access memory (VRAM) chip at
IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center by Richard Matick, Frederick Dill and Daniel Ling
(no longer at IBM) in 1980, we might still be staring at monochromatic displays devoid
of high-speed, high-resolution graphics. It was for this achievement that Dill and Matick
were honored at IBM's annual Corporate Technical Recognition Event last June in Naples,
Florida.
VRAM, as its name implies, is a special kind of memory.
What distinguishes a VRAM chip from the DRAM chips that form a computer's
main memory is a second input/output (I/O) port by which data can be transferred
simultaneously and independently of the usual data I/O path. The image on the screen
is stored in the VRAM as a digital bit map. Thanks to the second port, some 20 million bits
of data stored in the bit map can refresh a typical PC screen 60 times a second while the bit
map is simultaneously updated through the first I/O port. Such speed is essential
for creating illusions that we now take for granted, such as the movement of a window
as it is dragged across the screen.
Despite such strides beyond the graphics that were possible with single I/O ports,
he significance of VRAM was not immediately grasped. Only with the development of the PC market
and sophisticated graphics-oriented software did attitudes begin to change.
IBM received a U.S. patent in 1985 and put the first VRAM chips to use in the PC/RT in 1986,
setting the standard for future graphics systems.
Since then, VRAM has been an industry-standard commodity chip, and the amount offered on
a given PC has become a key selling point. The success of VRAM and the substantial
licensing value of the patent resulted in the inventors' June honor, a $70,000
Corporate Patent Portfolio Award.
Tops in ops research
IBM Research has won the 1999 informs
Prize for its success in applying advanced e-business methodologies throughout IBM. The prize,
awarded by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, is given annually
to the organization that "has repeatedly applied the principles of OR/MS . . .
in varied, novel and lasting ways." The disciplines of operations research and
management science help organizations understand complex situations, predict system
behavior and improve system performance.
Among the IBM Research successes cited by the award committee were global manufacturing
network designs, supply chain inventory policies, and software applications for facility
design and manufacturing planning. These tools and techniques were put to use in the
Global
Services, Technology, Personal Systems and Server groups, saving hundreds of millions
of dollars and helping IBM better manage operations, improve products and develop more
competitive strategies.
Last year, IBM won two other major awards in the same fields: the Daniel H. Wagner Prize
for Excellence in Operations Research Practice and the Franz Edelman Award for Management
Science. The Wagner prize resulted from work done with an IBM customer, Madison Paper.
The Edelman award recognized an innovative system for optimizing extended enterprise supply
chains, a system that was successfully implemented in several IBM divisions. ]
