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Canadian group testing world's largest disk drive Article de Jill Vardy, - CANARIE Inc., Canada's advanced Internet development organization, has a plan that could make today's super computers seem downright slow. CANARIE has built the world's largest disk drive -- the part of any computer system that reads and writes data. The Wavelength Disk Drive will be a huge, countrywide optical storage facility constructed around wavelengths of light on CANARIE's national optical research network, CA net 3. When testing of the prototype is finished in the next few months, its capacity is expected to be several gigabytes. "Researchers have recognized that harnessing the computing power of thousands of personal computers connected to the Internet would provide more computing power than even the largest super computers," said Andrew Bjerring, CANARIE president. "This innovative project is intended to address one of the challenges inherent in realizing this dream: the difficulty of sharing large amounts of data efficiently among thousands of computers, each trying to communicate with the others." Computers connected to the wavelength disk drive will read and write the data to the optical network as if it were one large, shared disk drive. They will have ready access to all data circulating on the network, improving their collective ability to quickly solve problems. Using optical networks for collaborative research would improve such sciences as environmental modelling, genomic and pharmaceutical simulations and astrophysics, proponents say. jvardy@nationalpost.com |