A knowledge ark, the Arch project

Read an article last week on the Arch Mission Foundation project, which is a non-profit, organization that intends “to continuously preserve and disseminate human knowledge throughout time and space”.

The way I read this is they want to capture, preserve  and replicate all mankind’s knowledge onto (semi-)permanent media and store this information  at various locations around the globe and wherever we may go.

Interesting way to go about doing this. There are plenty of questions and considerations to capturing all of mankind’s knowledge.

Google’s way

 Google has electronically scanned every book in a number of library partners to help provide a searchable database of literature, check out the Google Books Library Project.

There’s over 40 library partners around the globe and the intent of the project was to digitize their collections. The library partners can then provide access to their digital copies. Google will provide full access to books in the public domain and will provide search results for all the rest, with pointers as to where the books can be found in libraries, purchased and otherwise obtained.

Google Books can be searched at Google Books. Last I heard they had digitized over 30M books from their library partners, which is pretty impressive since the Library of Congress has around 37M books. Google Books is starting to scan magazines as well.

Arch’s way

The intent is to create Arch’s (pronounced Ark’s) that can last billions of years. The organization is funding R&D into long lived storage technologies.

Some of these technologies include:

  • 5D laser optical data storage in quartz, I wrote about this before (see my 5D storage … post). Essentially, they are able to record two-tone scans of documents in transparent quartz that can last eons. Data is recorded in 5 dimensions, size of dot, polarity of dot  and 3 layers of dot locations through the media. 5D media lasts for 1000s of years.
  • Nickel ion-beam atomic scale storage, couldn’t find much on this online but we suppose this technology uses ion-beams to etch a nickel surface with nano-scale information.
  • Molecular storage on DNA molecules, I wrote about this before as well (see my DNA as storage… post) but there’s been plenty of research on this more recently. A group from Padua, IT  shows the way forward to use bacteria as a read/write head for DNA storage and there are claims that a gram of DNA could hold a ZB (zettabyte, 10**21 bytes) of data. For some reason Microsoft has been very active in researching this technology and plan to add it to Azure someday.
  • Durable space based flash drives, couldn’t find anything on this technology but assume this is some variant of NAND storage optimized for long duration.  Current NAND loses charge over time. Alternatively, this could be a version of other NVM storage, such as, MRAM, 3DX, ReRAM, Graphene Flash, and  Memristor all of which I have written about
  • Long duration DVD technology, this is sort of old school but there exists archive class WORM DVDs out and available on the market today, (see my post on M[illeniata]-Disc…).
  • Quantum information storage, current quantum memory lifetimes don’t much over exceed 180 seconds, but this is storage not memory. Couldn’t find much else on this, but it might be referring to permanent data storage with light.
M-Disc (c) 2011 Millenniata (from their website)
M-Disc (c) 2011 Millenniata (from their website)

They seem technology agnostic but want something that will last forever.

But what knowledge do they plan to store

In Arch’s FAQ they talk about open data sets like Wikipedia and the Internet Archive. But they have an interesting perspective on which knowledge to save. From an advanced future civilization perspective, they are probably not as interested in our science and technology but rather more interested in our history, art and culture.

They believe that science and technology should be roughly the same in every advanced civilization. But history, art and culture are going to be vastly different across different civilizations. As such, history, art and culture are uniquely valuable to some future version of ourselves or any other advanced scientific civilization.

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Arch intends to have multiple libraries positioned on the Earth, on the Moon and Mars over time. And they are actively looking for donations and participation (see link above).

Although, I agree that culture, art and history will be most beneficial to any advanced civilization. But there’s always a small but distinct probability that we may not continue to exist as an advanced scientific civilization. In that case, I would think, science and technology would also be needed to boot strap civilization.

To the Wikipedia, I would add GitHub, probably Google Books, and PLOS as well as any other publicly available scientific or humanities journals that available.

And don’t get me started on what format to record the data with. Needless to say, out-dated formats are going to be a major concern for anything but a 2D scan of information after about ten years or so.

In any case, humanity and universanity needs something like this.

Photo Credit(s): The Arch Mission Foundation web page

Google Books Library search on Republic results

“Five dimensional glass disks …” from The Verge

M-disk web page

(Storage QoM 16-001): Will we see NVM Express (NVMe) drives GA’d in enterprise storage over the next year

NVMeFirst, let me state that QoM stands for Question of the Month. Doing these forecast can be a lot of work, and rather than focusing my whole blog on weekly forecast questions and answers, I would like to do something else as well. So, from now on we are doing only one new forecast a month.

So for the first question of 2016, we will forecast whether NVMe SSDs will be GA’d in enterprise storage over the next year.

NVM Express (NVMe) means the new PCIe interface for SSD storage. Wikipedia has a nice description of NVMe. As discussed there, NVMe was designed for higher performance and enhanced parallelism which comes with the PCI Express (PCIe) bus. The current version of the NVMe spec is 1.2a (available here).

GA means generally available for purchase by any customer.

Enterprise storage systems refers to mid-range and enterprise class storage systems from major AND non-major storage vendors, which includes startups.

Over the next year means by 19 January 2017.

Special thanks to Kacey Lai (@mrdedupe), Primary Data for suggesting this months question.

Current and updates to previous forecasts

 

Update on QoW 15-001 (3DX) forecast:

News out today indicates that 3DX (3D XPoint non-volatile memory) samples may be available soon but it could take another 12 to 18 months to get it into production. 3DX manufacturing is more challenging than current planar NAND technology and uses about 100 new materials, many of which are currently single sourced. We already built into our 3DX forecast potential delays in reaching production in 6 months. The news above says this could be worse than  expected. As such, I feel even stronger that there is less of a possibility of 3DX shipping in storage systems by next December. So I would update my forecast for QoW 15-001 to NO with an 0.75 probability at this time.

So current forecasts for QoW 15-001 are:

A) YES with 0.85 probability; and

B) NO with 0.75 probability

Current QoW 15-002 (3D TLC) forecast

We have 3 active participants, current forecasts are:

A) Yes with 0.95 probability;

B) No with 0.53 probability; and

C) Yes with 1.0 probability

Current QoW 15-003 (SMR disk) forecast

We have 1 active participant, current forecast is:

A) Yes with 0.85 probability