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