Data Processing At The Speed Of Light b4in.org/p4Qs Is our increasingly computer-driven world creates more and more data, the need for enhanced processing power to store, retrieve and analyse that data is significantly growing. In fields ranging from science and medicine to finance and business, security and defence, it is now commonplace to talk about ‘big data’ and the challenge of managing such vast quantities of information. It is a challenge that is already starting to exceed the capabilities of existing technology, since the processing speeds that are possible using conventional magnetic fields to store and retrieve data on media such as hard discs are approaching their limits. The EU-funded project ULTRAMAGNETRON investigated radical new ways of improving data handling speeds. The focus of the research team’s approach was on developing ways of controlling magnetic storage using light rather than magnetic fields, as it was the case in the past. Given that a laser pulse is one of the shortest man-made events ever devised, with ultrafast lasers now operating in the terahertz (THz) range – in other words, at trillions of cycles per second – the use of this technology was seen as a promising avenue to explore. The key aspect determining the performance of magnetic storage media is not the original saving of the data but the ‘reading back’ of it – the speed of access and retrieval of that data by a process known as ‘magnetisation reversal’. Here, the ULTRAMAGNETRON team was working with concepts of speed that are little short of mind-boggling to an outsider. From magnetisation reversal speeds currently measured in nanoseconds, or thousandths of a millionth of a second, ULTRAMAGNETRON’s aim was to move it into the realm of picoseconds – millionths of one millionth of a second. More b4in.org/p4Qs
Posted on: Tue, 10 Jun 2014 17:53:52 +0000
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