Read an article this week in Science Daily (Magnetic skyrmions: Not the only one of their class; …) about new magnetic structures that could lend themselves to creating a new type of moving, non-volatile storage. (There’s more information in the press release and the Nature paper [DOI: 10.1038/s41565-018-0093-3], behind a paywall).
Skyrmions and chiral bobbers are both considered magnetic solitons, types of magnetic structures only 10’s of nm wide, that can move around, in sort of a race track configuration.
Delay line memories
Early in computing history, there was a type of memory called a delay line memory which used various mechanisms (mercury, magneto-resistence, capacitors, etc.) arranged along a circular line such as a wire, and had moving pulses of memory that raced around it. .
One problem with delay line memory was that it was accessed sequentially rather than core which could be accessed randomly. When using delay lines to change a bit, one had to wait until the bit came under the read/write head . It usually took microseconds for a bit to rotate around the memory line and delay line memories had a capacity of a few thousand bits 256-512 bytes per line, in today’s vernacular.
Delay lines predate computers and had been used for decades to delay any electronic or acoustic signal before retransmission.
A new racetrack
Solitons are being investigated to be used in a new form of delay line memory, called racetrack memory. Skyrmions had been discovered a while ago but the existence of chiral bobbers was only theoretical until researchers discovered them in their lab.
Previously, the thought was that one would encode digital data with only skyrmions and spaces. But the discovery of chiral bobbers and the fact that they can co-exist with skyrmions, means that chiral bobbers and skyrmions can be used together in a racetrack fashion to record digital data. And the fact that both can move or migrate through a material makes them ideal for racetrack storage.
Unclear whether chiral bobbers and skyrmions only have two states or more but the more the merrier for storage. I am assuming that bit density or reliability is increased by having chiral bobbers in the chain rather than spaces.
Unlike disk devices with both rotating media and moving read-write heads, the motion of skyrmion-chiral bobber racetrack storage is controlled by a very weak pulse of current and requires no moving/mechanical parts prone to wear/tear. Moreover, as a solid state devices, racetrack memory is not sensitive to induced/organic vibration or shock, So, theoretically these devices should have higher reliability than disk devices.
There was no information comparing the new racetrack memory reliability to NAND or 3D Crosspoint/PCM SSDs, but there may be some advantage here as well. I suppose one would need to understand how to miniaturize the read-erase-write head to the right form factor for nm racetracks to understand how it compares.
And I didn’t see anything describing how long it takes to rotate through bits on a skyrmion-chiral bobber racetrack. Of course, this would depend on the number of bits on a racetrack, but some indication of how long it takes one bit to move, one postition on the racetrack would be helpful to see what its rotational latency might be.
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At the moment, reading and writing skyrmions and the newly discovered chiral bobbers takes a lot of advanced equipment and is only done in major labs. As such, I don’t see a skyrmion-chiral bobber racetrack storage device arriving on my desktop anytime soon. But the fact that there’s a long way to go before, we run out of magnetic storage options, even if it is on a chip rather than magnetic media, is comforting to know. Even if we don’t ever come up with an economical way to produce it.
I wonder if you could synchronize rotational timing across a number of racetrack devices, at least that way you could be reading/erasing/writing a whole byte, word, double word etc, at a time, rather than a single bit.
Comments?
Photo Credit(s): From Experimental observation of chiral magnetic bobbers in B20 Type FeGe paper
From Experimental observation of chiral magnetic bobbers in B20 Type FeGe paper
From Timeline of computer history Magnetoresistive delay lines
From Experimental observation of chiral magnetic bobbers in B20 Type FeGe paper
We talked with Hitachi Vantara this past week at a special Tech Field Day extra event (see 
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HCP development team has transitioned to using micro services/container based applications and have developed their Foundry Framework to make this easier. I believe the intent is to ultimately redevelop all HCP solutions using Foundry.
At 
They have some specially, designed, optimized code paths. For example, standard RAID TP algorithms perform RAID protection at 2.3GB/sec or 4.5GB/s but Huawei OceanStor Dorada 18000F can perform triple RAID calculations at 6.5GB/s. Similarly, standard LZ4 data compression algorithms can compress data at ~507MB/sec (on email) but Huawei’s data compression algorithm can perform compression (on email) at ~979MB/s. Ditto for CRC16 (used to check block integrity). Traditional CRC16 algorithms operate at ~2.3GB/sec but Hauwei can sustain ~7.2GB/s.
NetApp announced this week that their latest generation AFF (All Flash FAS) systems will support FC NVMeoF. We asked if this was just for NVMe SSDs or did it apply to all AFF media. The answer was it’s just another host interface which the customer can license for NVMe SSDs (available only on AFF F800) or SAS SSDs (A700S, A700, and A300). The only AFF not supporting the new host interface is their lowend AFF A220.
They also christened their new Data Visualization Center (DVC) and we had a multi-course meal at the Bistro at the center. The DVC had a wrap around, 1.5 floor tall screen which showed some of NetApp customer success stories. Inside the screen was a more immersive setting and there was plenty of VR equipment in work spaces alongside customer conference rooms.
Phill Bullinger and his staff from Western Digital presented at 
As WDC is both the supplier of the ActiveScale appliance and a supplier of disk storage they can be fairly aggressive with pricing on appliance systems.
A typical BitSpread configuration splits object data into 18 chunks and spreads these chunks across storage columns. A storage column is from 6-18 storage nodes. There’s no pre-allocated space in BitSpread. Object data chunks are allocated to disk storage based on current capacity and performance of the system, within redundancy constraints.
Read a couple of articles this week 
Researchers at Microsoft and the University of Washington have come up with a solution to the sequential access limitation. They have used polymerase chain reaction (PCR) primers as a unique identifier for files. They can construct a complementary PCR primer that can be used to extract just DNA segments that match this primer and amplify (replicate) all DNA sequences matching this primer tag that exist in the cell.
Apparently the researchers chunk file data into a block of 150 base pairs. As there are 2 complementary base pairs, I assume one bit to one base pair mapping. As such, 150 base pairs or bits of data per segment means ~18 bytes of data per segment. Presumably this is to allow for more efficient/effective encoding of data into DNA strings.
It’s unclear whether DNA data storage should support a multi-level hierarchy, like file system directories structures or a flat hierarchy like object storage data, which just has buckets of objects data. Considering the cellular structure of DNA data it appears to me more like buckets and the glacial access seems to be more useful to archive systems. So I would lean to a flat hierarchy and an object storage structure.
If this were the case, you’d almost want to create a separate, data nucleus inside a cell, that would just hold file data and wouldn’t interfere with normal cellular operations.
I read an article a while back on Finland’s use of blockchain technology to provide bank accounts and identity services to immigrants (see 
I read another article the other day “
Ethereum was invented to support smart contracts that run on blockchain technology. IBM’s HyperLegder OpenLedger project (see our 
Read an article last week on the 
Google has electronically scanned every book in a number of library partners to help provide a searchable database of literature, check out the 
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