“A zettabyte is one billion terabytes. For context, 7.7 zettabytes is the equivalent to:
- 107 trillion hours of streaming music -- about 1.5 years of continuous music streaming for the world’s population in 2017.
- 19 trillion hours of business web conferencing -- about 14 hours of daily web conferencing for the world’s workforce in 2017.
- 8 trillion hours of online high-definition (HD) video streaming -- about 2.5 hours of daily streamed HD video for the world’s population in 2017.”
|Graduate student Qing Gu at work in the Fainman lab in the ECE dept. at UC San Diego's Jacobs School of Engineering.|
In their commentary, electrical engineer Yeshaiahu (Shaya) Fainman and computer scientist George Porter proposed replacing the racks and racks of servers in today’s data centers into a single chip. “These ‘rack-on-chips’ will be networked, internally and externally, with both optical circuit switching to support large flows of data and electronic packet switching to support high-priority data flows,” Fainman and Porter write.
“But the meat and potatoes of Yeshaiahu Fainman and George Porter’s server-rack-on-a-chip vision is really about taking the existing framework for a server rack and recreating it at the nano-level. They say that miniaturizing all server components so that several servers can fit onto a computer chip would increase processing speed. Making circuit systems to support all these mini-components using advanced lithography is already feasible, but scientists have yet to realize nano-transceivers and circuit-switchers—the key components that transmit data. And while silicon chips are increasing being used to transmit data-carrying light waves in fiber optic networks, efficiently generating light on a silicon chip is still early in its development. The researchers offer some solutions, like including light generating nanolasers in the chip design.”