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128-bit storage: are you high?

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Re: 128-bit storage: are you high?

#41

Post by celoyd »

TheNewAndy wrote: post #39

It can be useful to have a large address space, even if you don't have enough hardware to actually populate the whole thing. For example, you might split the address space into smaller sections (executable, read only, read/write, shared, etc) which immediately cuts down the space you have. Or you might decide that your method for allocating space is to pick a random part of the address space, and check if it is taken…

Or you might have some highly drive-abstracted representation where every addressable thing in every version of a filesystem-like dataset has its own address. No one’s asking to do that now (as far as I know), but if we get 128 bits I bet we’ll come up with ways to use them.

Re: 128-bit storage: are you high?

#42

Post by sedachv »

Fun fact: the AS/400 virtual instruction set uses 128-bit pointers (that get truncated when executing on a real machine). It's not excessive considering that the AS/400 is not only a flat-memory architecture, but a single-level store.

I think storage will eventually move to the Venti model of hash addressing. It just makes much more sense on a network and with current archive-everything practices (there are some really big wins to be gained from compression and dedup there). BitTorrent is doing this already.

Re: 128-bit storage: are you high?

#43

Post by anamax »

TheNewAndy wrote: post #39

It can be useful to have a large address space, even if you don't have enough hardware to actually populate the whole thing. For example, you might split the address space into smaller sections (executable, read only, read/write, shared, etc) which immediately cuts down the space you have. Or you might decide that your method for allocating space is to pick a random part of the address space, and check if it is taken…

You can also do things like versioning, which lets you detect use-after-delete, and typed pointers.

Re: 128-bit storage: are you high?

#44

Post by Dn_Ab »

runjake wrote: post #38
anon114 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll just leave this here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrioshka_brain

Reddit memes usually aren't kosher around here.

I dont read reddit much so that concept has a much more positive association for me since it brings to mind Accelerado and the crazy economics 2.0 with its sentient corporations using humans as currency and crazy intelligent 419 scams.

Re: 128-bit storage: are you high?

#45

Post by konad »

sedachv wrote: post #42

Fun fact: the AS/400 virtual instruction set uses 128-bit pointers (that get truncated when executing on a real machine). It's not excessive considering that the AS/400 is not only a flat-memory architecture, but a single-level store. I think storage will eventually move to the Venti model of hash addressing. It just makes much more sense on a network and with current archive-everything practices (there are some real…

venti rules hard :)

Re: 128-bit storage: are you high?

#46

Post by suraj »

jessriedel wrote: post #30
sammcd wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A proffessor once told me never to believe the physical limits. He mentioned how a wavelength of light was the smallest we could etch silicon. He then mentioned that today (at the time of the class) we were etching with 1/20th the wavelength of light. He then said that he could not explain how the new 1/20th of of a wavelength drawing works because new physics had been learned, and it had not been in his physics book…

Your sentiment is healthy, but you should distinguish between "we don't know of a way to do X" and "X is impossible under the current laws of physics". The former is like etching sub-wavelength silicon. The latter is like moving faster than the speed of light. > new physics had been learned, and it had not been in his physics book. Again, there is a difference between learning new techniques and phenomena running on…

My brain is probably addled by reading a lot of science fiction. But here are my thoughts on the matter. We know of two ways in which energy is manifested in stable form. The matter particles and the force carrying particles. Recent astronomical observations point to a third form i.e. dark matter. So hopefully in future we may uncover (or device) yet another form of energy which would find 128bits on a low side.

Re: 128-bit storage: are you high?

#47

Post by rbanffy »

jessriedel wrote: post #30
sammcd wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A proffessor once told me never to believe the physical limits. He mentioned how a wavelength of light was the smallest we could etch silicon. He then mentioned that today (at the time of the class) we were etching with 1/20th the wavelength of light. He then said that he could not explain how the new 1/20th of of a wavelength drawing works because new physics had been learned, and it had not been in his physics book…

Your sentiment is healthy, but you should distinguish between "we don't know of a way to do X" and "X is impossible under the current laws of physics". The former is like etching sub-wavelength silicon. The latter is like moving faster than the speed of light. > new physics had been learned, and it had not been in his physics book. Again, there is a difference between learning new techniques and phenomena running on…

> "X is impossible under the current laws of physics"

I think the keyword here is "current".

While the development of "new physics" is unlikely, those developments have never failed to surprise us before. We have ever increasing capabilities to both explore and observe the world around us. I find it highly unlikely that we have cracked all there is to physics.

Re: 128-bit storage: are you high?

#48

Post by natep »

Dn_Ab wrote: post #44
runjake wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit memes usually aren't kosher around here.

I dont read reddit much so that concept has a much more positive association for me since it brings to mind Accelerado and the crazy economics 2.0 with its sentient corporations using humans as currency and crazy intelligent 419 scams.

You're talking about the content of anon114's link, but what was reddit-like about his comment was the formulaic "I'll just leave this here: " which doesn't contribute as much to the discussion as the comments that do get upvoted.

Re: 128-bit storage: are you high?

#49

Post by jing »

nl wrote: post #37
jing wrote: post #33

Yes, this is theoretically cool and all, but when I hear something like: "Let's start with the easy one: how do we know it's necessary? Some customers already have datasets on the order of a petabyte, or 250 bytes. Thus the 64-bit capacity limit of 264 bytes is only 14 doublings away." It raises a huge red flag from a business point of view. In 2004 "some customers" had datasets that would cause issues sometime aroun…

ZFS has been one of the biggest selling points for Solaris over the last 5 years. There are a huge number of places that use Solaris only for ZFS support. For example, the SmugMug people have written about it a number of times.

ZFS may have been, but not the 128 bit support. I mentioned that there are "admittedly much more relevant features" which are in fact what smugmug likes:

"ZFS is the most amazing filesystem I’ve ever come across. Integrated volume management. Copy-on-write. Transactional. End-to-end data integrity. On-the-fly corruption detection and repair. Robust checksums. No RAID-5 write hole. Snapshots. Clones (writable snapshots). Dynamic striping. Open source software."

http://bit.ly/bg2xlf

I never disputed ZFS being a good file system. I claimed that 128 bit support wasn't a key feature and was in fact a potential waste of time.

Re: 128-bit storage: are you high?

#50

Post by ithkuil »

rbanffy wrote: post #47
jessriedel wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your sentiment is healthy, but you should distinguish between "we don't know of a way to do X" and "X is impossible under the current laws of physics". The former is like etching sub-wavelength silicon. The latter is like moving faster than the speed of light. > new physics had been learned, and it had not been in his physics book. Again, there is a difference between learning new techniques and phenomena running on…

> "X is impossible under the current laws of physics" I think the keyword here is "current". While the development of "new physics" is unlikely, those developments have never failed to surprise us before. We have ever increasing capabilities to both explore and observe the world around us. I find it highly unlikely that we have cracked all there is to physics.

btw, even with the "current" laws of physics the energy required to boil earth's oceans is not that big http://pinktentacle.com/2010/09/animated-simulation-of-aster...

While all this discussion about the actual laws of physics is very important, I would like to underline the fact the the other half of the reasoning about whether 128 bits are enough is centered around the fact that we are of course not able to handle that amount of energy, it sounds so obvious for all of us that this argument is used as a punchline.

While I cannot imagine how it could be done (or why), this is the kind of things doesn't involve changing our knowledge about basic physical laws.

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