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

Next generation NVM, 3D XPoint from Intel + Micron

cross_point_image_for_photo_capsuleEarlier this week Intel-Micron announced (see webcast here and here)  a new, transistor-less NVM with 1000 time the speed (10µsec access time for NAND) of NAND [~10ns (nano-second) access times] and at 10X the density of DRAM (currently 16Gb/DRAM chip). They call the new technology 3D XPoint™ (cross-point) NVM (non-volatile memory).

In addition to the speed and density advantages, 3D XPoint NVM also doesn’t have the endurance problems associated with todays NAND. Intel and Micron say that it has 1000 the endurance of today’s NAND (MLC NAND endurance is ~3000 write (P/E) cycles).

At that 10X current DRAM density it’s roughly equivalent to todays MLC/TLC NAND capacities/chip. And at 1000 times the speed of NAND, it’s roughly equivalent in performance to DDR4 DRAM. Of course, because it’s non-volatile it should take much less power to use than current DRAM technology, no need for power refresh.

We have talked about the end of NAND before (see The end of NAND is here, maybe). If this is truly more scaleable than NAND it seems to me that the it does signal the end of NAND. It’s just a matter of time before endurance and/or density growth of NAND hits a wall and then 3D XPoint can do everything NAND can do but better, faster and more reliably.

3D XPoint technology

The technology comes from a dual layer design which is divided into columns and at the top and bottom of the columns are accessor connections in an orthogonal pattern that together form a grid to access a single bit of memory.  This also means that 3D Xpoint NVM can be read and written a bit at a time (rather than a “page” at a time with NAND) and doesn’t have to be initialized to 0 to be written like NAND.

The 3D nature of the new NVM comes from the fact that you can build up as many layers as you want of these structures to create more and more NVM cells. The microscopic pillar  between the two layers of wiring include a memory cell and a switch component which allows a bit of data to be accessed (via the switch) and stored/read (memory cell). In the photo above the yellow material is a switch and the green material is a memory cell.

A memory cell operates by a using a bulk property change of the material. Unlike DRAM (floating gates of electrons) or NAND (capacitors to hold memory values). As such it uses all of the material to hold a memory value which should allow 3D XPoint memory cells to scale downwards much better than NAND or DRAM.

Intel and Micron are calling the new 3D XPoint NVM storage AND memory. That is suitable for fast access, non-volatile data storage and non-volatile processor memory.

3D XPoint NVM chips in manufacturing today

First chips with the new technology are being manufactured today at Intel-Micron’s joint manufacturing fab in Idaho. The first chips will supply 128Gb of NVM and uses just two layers of 3D XPoint memory.

Intel and Micron will independently produce system products (read SSDs or NVM memory devices) with the new technology during 2016. They mentioned during the webcast that the technology is expected to be attached (as SSDs) to a PCIe bus and use NVMe as an interface to read and write it. Although if it’s used in a memory application, it might be better attached to the processor memory bus.

The expectation is that the 3D XPoint cost/bit will be somewhere in between NAND and DRAM, i.e. more expensive than NAND but less expensive than DRAM. It’s nice to be the only companies in the world with a new, better storage AND memory technology.

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Over the last 10 years or so, SSDs (solid state devices) all used NAND technologies of one form or another, but after today SSDs can be made from NAND or 3D XPoint technology.

Some expected uses for the new NVM is in gaming applications (currently storage speed and memory constrained) and for in-memory databases (which are memory size constrained).  There was mention on the webcast of edge analytics as well.

Welcome to the dawn of a new age of computer storage AND memory.

Photo Credits: (c) 2015 Intel and Micron, from Intel’s 3D XPoint website