a yottabyte is a spetillion byte ...

[Mike O'Dell]

RS,
They aren't going to store a yottabyte tomorrow, but 20 TB drives are on
the roadmap of the drive makers. that's only 500 million drives.

It is worth noting that the NSA has been relatively successful driving
technology. in the early 1970s, they had multiple terabits of near-line
storage in the IBM 1360 Photodigital Store.

Given their engineering motto, "Why use lead when gold will do?"
they don't have the same constraints of others. The 64GB microSDHX cards
mentioned in Wikipedia are nowhere near the state of the art in current 
packaging
technology or chip capacity. at least 10x on the microSDHX form factor 
is not a problem
if you don't sweat the cost.

All of these comparisons go against "stuff you can buy down at Microcenter",
not "stuff you can have made if you don't care about cost now and intend
to buy enough to drive down the cost over time."

This is what was done in the Apollo Guidance Computer, the very first 
computer built
entirely of the utterly brand-new Integrated Circuits. The problem was that
only Fairchild could make them, and then only on alternate Tuesdays.

NASA decided the only way to learn to make ICs was to make a
a huge number of them. "Practice practice practice." So NASA insisted that
Fairchild licensed two other semiconductor companies to make the parts
and then ordered a million ICs between the 3 of them.

That did *two* things: together they made enough that even with
crap yields they could get enough parts to build the machines,
but more importantly, it was enough to crawl up the learning curve.

The three sources worked together constantly so they all got smart and
together learned to make the parts. Then when Fairchild improved the part
with another input to the gate(!), it reduced the mass and volume of the
computer enough to make it fit in the spacecraft (both Command Modules
and Lunar Modules), everyone moved over to the new part quite successfully.

So think carefully about a double handful of 256GB flash chips, tab-tape 
bonded
onto a thin composite substrate the size of a 4"x6" card with an SoC 
processor
part (twin-core A18, etc). Imagine those with designed to fit onto a 
micro ZIF
connector for power and Ethernet or PCIe. Add a robotics system to view 
those
as "removable media" which can be stacked and stored very densely, although
it would allow a huge number of them live at once.

So here you have a Fermi-style back-of-the-envelope design which can reach
a yottabyte pretty quickly, especially if you have a billion dollars to 
spend
getting the job done.  And there are a number of firms happy (and 
sufficiently
trusted) to do it for them. My first guess would be IBM since they have a
secure fab that can make all the necessary parts and have a long history
building the kind of packaging this could leverage. The IBM 4381
mid-line mainframe that came to market in the early 1980s contained
ceramic circuit boards with 40-odd layers including the integral heat
spreaders.

     -mo



On 7/27/13 12:07 PM, Rob Seastrom wrote:
> The Wikipedia article on "yottabyte" saved me the requirement of doing
> my own Fermi-question-style order of magnitude calculation.
>
> I think it's safe to say that the NSA is not going to be storing
> "yottabytes" of data.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yottabyte
>
> -r
>
> Phil <philmt59 at aol.com> writes:
>
>> IS there that much data?
>>
>>
>>
>> Phil M1GWZ
>>
>> Sent from my iMagination
>>
>> On 26 Jul 2013, at 16:41, Andre Kesteloot <[[andre.kesteloot at verizon.net]]>
>> wrote:
>>
>>
>>                 A 2012 article in Wired reported that NSA needs the
>>       megaplex [in Utah] partially because the Pentagon wants to expand
>>       the military global communications network to manage yottabytes of
>>       data. âoeA yottabyte is a septillion bytesâ''so large that no one
>>       has yet coined a term for the next higher magnitude,âY\.. the
>>       article said. âoeShould the agency ever fill the Utah center with a
>>       yottabyte of information, it would be equal to about 500 quintillion
>>       (500,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text.âY\.. NSA officials told
>>       Government Executive, however, they do not discuss such operational
>>       details.
>>       
>>
>>       [[http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2013/07/nsas-big-dig/67406/]]
>>
>>            
>>
>>
>>                 _______________________________________________
>>       Tacos mailing list
>>       [[Tacos at amrad.org]]
>>       [[https://amrad.org/mailman/listinfo/tacos]]
>>       
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Tacos mailing list
>> Tacos at amrad.org
>> https://amrad.org/mailman/listinfo/tacos
> _______________________________________________
> Tacos mailing list
> Tacos at amrad.org
> https://amrad.org/mailman/listinfo/tacos