Moving molecules at IBM Almaden

IBM's researchers in the San Francisco Bay Area have been at the forefront of data storage for decades.

IBM Almaden's scanning tunneling microscope.

(Credit: Corinne Schulze/CNET News.com)

An IBM team invented the first hard drive (the IBM 350, which was part of a machine called RAMAC) 52 years ago in San Jose, Calif. The relational database came out of IBM's labs in the area, too.

Now, scientists at IBM Almaden are trying to come up with breakthroughs that will help computers sift through the "exabytes" of data that have become an inevitability for many corporations and government agencies. (An exabyte is a quintillion bytes, or a billion gigabytes.)

"The problems we're looking at aren't computationally driven per se, but more information management problems," said Mark Dean, an IBM fellow and director of the Almaden Research Center. "Computation is not the hard part anymore."

In the future, some computers may not give absolute answers, but will cough up approximate ones after sifting through oceans of data, Dean said. The approximate answers, ideally, will be able to narrow down the scope of an inquiry or problem, which could then be handled by a computer that can provide precise answers. Some of the systems may also function more like the human brain.

Although IBM got out of hard drives a few years ago, some researchers at Almaden are experimenting with new types of hardware for storing data. The idea is to leap years ahead and come out with storage devices that consist of a few molecules. If the technology is far enough ahead of its time, IBM would have an opportunity to make some money selling equipment or licensing its inventions.

Check out this CNET News.com photo gallery to get a look at some of the people and projects under way at the lab.

[www.hdgreetings.com]

exabytes? for what?

What's the least exotic (most understandable) thing that requires "exabytes" of data?

The article mentions "companies" need this, but are there even any non-scientific needs for exabytes?

[skipperjohn]

Need for exabytes?

I can think of some things very quickly.

Movies and photos at very high resolutions stored digitally. Each movie would eat up tons of storage. Likewise for music at very high sampling rates that is stored digitally.

Data that is streaming down from weather satelites and other weather measuring instruments.

Data from simulations of stars and galaxies.

Probably lots more.

[wildchild_plasma_gyro]

I have that problem all the time.

Yep These days the Data required for the lossless holographic scenes in the windows, the Childrens game interaction room, the electrinic house regulators, the wifes moneculer food maker, Weather charter and assistent helping a stable and good enviroment for nature and of course who could forget the double crystal Chinese chi form disigned mars cruiser, Oh and yes that personal mini full size feamale production system we all know the boy has hidden away yep with the data we require these day each week we pray to the Great IBM to please sort the Energy crises out and stop using technology diversity to make your money situation look better we can i'll afford for the wife to have to wait occoationally half an hour before she can produce the food dish it sends her barmy.

[whmurray]

exabytes will be useful...

...for backing up the human brain, the mind, and the personality. According to Kurzweil, by the end of the the century one may be required by law to back up one's personality every ten minutes or so.