Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!bu-cs!purdue!decwrl!sun!pitstop!sundc!seismo!uunet!mcvax!unido!ecrcvax!johng From: johng@ecrcvax.UUCP (John Gregor) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: Lightning Fast Photonic Optical Computers Keywords: optical, photonic, supercomputers, switching Message-ID: <559@ecrcvax.UUCP> Date: 21 Jun 88 11:59:31 GMT References: <1933@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu> Reply-To: johng@ecrcvax.UUCP (John Gregor) Organization: ECRC, Munich 81, West Germany Lines: 92 In article <1933@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu> garvin@uhccux.UUCP (Jay Garvin) writes: >How many of you have heard of photonic switching? Everybody?...Great! >Ok, I would like to find out what the latest research is in this area >and who's doing it. Well, this isn't exactly recent (1983), but I though it was interesting. First the title of the paper: A 100,000 gigabyte on-line storage system Marc A. Friedlander Advanced Technology Laboratories 8027 Leesburg Pike, Suite 700 Vienna, Virginia 22180 It appeared in a SPIE proceedings back in 83. The proceedings title was "Optical Mass Storage" or "Mass Storage Devices" or something to that effect. A keyword search should find it quickly. Sorry, I only photocopied the article. I don't know SPIE's copyright policy, or I would post more. But here is the abstract and introduction form the paper. ABSTRACT Nanosecond read, write and access times, system volumes of one cubic foot, and costs of 1E-8 cents per bit characterize this new volumetric optical technology. INTRODUCTION We report a new optical storage technology (patent pending), and its applications, which can provide 100,000 gigabytes of on-line storage with nanosecond read and write times, nanosecond access times, and in a volume of one cubic foot. The high storage density, and consequent short access time, is accomplished by three dimensional storage within an unstructured bulk storage medium at a storage density of one cubic micron per bit using visible light. The storage is effected by the photon echo phenomenon(1) which decisively surmounts the problems faced by previous volumetric optical storage approaches. End user cost for production versions will be $100,000 (or 1E-8 cents per bit). The Navy is examining the development of a prototype for application to tactical air reconnaissance. The prototype will allow tactical reconnaissance imagery to be received, processed and analyzed in ral time as an aid to command decision making. Ground based versions could be applied to the development of large, fully relational data bases due to the presence of inherent logic elements associated with each bit of the storage system. Highly parallel input and output capability as well as the ability to store analog data make it feasible to use the system as an efficient interface point between analog and digital optical information processing systems. 1. I.D. Abella, N.A. Kurnit and S.R. Hartmann, Phys. Rev. 141, 391 (1966) Now I have some questions: Q. Anybody know if this thing got built? Q. Is the idea a flop or is it currently classified? Q. Is the company still around? Q. Anybody with access to some nifty bibliographic search facilities want to tell me if this guy (or his company) has published anything more recently or with more substance? What papers have referenced this one? And, what are some other good references for optical memory? Q. What's state of the art? Q. How long until we won't have to worry about dram prices any more :-)? Q. Can we expect the Cray III (IV?, V?) to have 20cc of optical memory and occupy less space than a pee-cee? Comments from those more knowledgeable than me (not hard) are welcome. >7. Anybody know of some *good* references/journal articles in the area? > SPIE? SPIE is about the best I've seen. They are VERY prolific though. They have put out a few hundred proceedings since '82. They cover any field that ever interacts with a photon; from synthetic aperature optics to user intefaces to computer architecture etc. Q. Anybody know what a yearly subscription would cost? Thanks for any and all information. -- John Gregor johng%ecrcvax.UUCP@pyramid.COM