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Microsoft and Warner Bros. Have collaborated to successfully store and retrieve the entire 1978 iconic “Superman” movie on a piece of glass roughly the size of a drink coaster, 75 by 75 by 2 millimeters thick.It was the first proof of concept test for, a Microsoft Research project that uses recent discoveries in ultrafast laser optics and artificial intelligence to store data in quartz glass. A laser encodes data in glass by creating layers of three-dimensional nanoscale gratings and deformations at various depths and angles. Machine learning algorithms read the data back by decoding images and patterns that are created as polarized light shines through the glass.The hard silica glass can withstand being boiled in hot water, baked in an oven, microwaved, flooded, scoured, demagnetized and other environmental threats that can destroy priceless historic archives or cultural treasures if things go wrong.It represents an investment by Microsoft Azure to develop storage technologies built specifically for cloud computing patterns, rather than relying on storage media designed to work in computers or other scenarios.
It’s just one of many ways Azure relies on Microsoft’s Research expertise to solve both near- and long-term challenges — from underwater data center tests to ’s FPGA processing power and the emerging research.“Storing the whole ‘Superman’ movie in glass and being able to read it out successfully is a major milestone,” said Mark Russinovich, Azure’s chief technology officer. “I’m not saying all of the questions have been fully answered, but it looks like we’re now in a phase where we’re working on refinement and experimentation, rather asking the question ‘can we do it?’”Warner Bros., which approached Microsoft after learning of the research, is always on the hunt for new technologies to safeguard its vast asset library: historic treasures like “Casablanca,” 1940s radio shows, animated shorts, digitally shot theatrical films, television sitcoms, dailies from film sets. For years, they had searched for a storage technology that could last hundreds of years, withstand floods or solar flares and that doesn’t require being kept at a certain temperature or need constant refreshing.“That had always been our beacon of hope for what we believed would be possible one day, so when we learned that Microsoft had developed this glass-based technology, we wanted to prove it out,” said Warner Bros.
Chief Technology Officer Vicky Colf. Driving down costs of long-term storageMost people think of “the cloud” as a way to store everything from thousands of family photos to millions of emails without taking up any space on your phone or computer. But all that information is being physically stored on hardware in a remote location, allowing you to access it from multiple devices.The amount of data humankind is now looking to store — from medical records to funny cat videos to images taken by spacecraft — is exploding at the same time that capacity of existing storage technologies is flattening.Long-term storage costs are driven up by the need to repeatedly transfer data onto newer media before the information is lost.
Hard disk drives can wear out after three to five years. Magnetic tape may only last five to seven. File formats become obsolete, and upgrades are expensive. In its own digital archives, for instance, Warner Bros.
Proactively migrates content every three years to stay ahead of degradation issues.Glass storage has the potential to become a lower-cost option because you only write the data onto the glass once. Femtosecond lasers — ones that emit ultrashort optical pulses and that are commonly used in LASIK surgery — permanently change the structure of the glass, so the data can be preserved for centuries.Quartz glass also doesn’t need energy-intensive air conditioning to keep material at a constant temperature or systems that remove moisture from the air – both of which could lower the environmental footprint of large-scale data storage.“We are not trying to build things that you put in your house or play movies from. We are building storage that operates at the cloud scale,” said Ant Rowstron, partner deputy lab director of Microsoft Research Cambridge in the United Kingdom, which collaborated with University of Southampton to develop Project Silica.“One big thing we wanted to eliminate is this expensive cycle of moving and rewriting data to the next generation.
We really want something you can put on the shelf for 50 or 100 or 1,000 years and forget about until you need it,” Rowstron said.Project Silica aims to store what’s known as “cold” data — archival data that may have tremendous value or that companies are required to maintain — but that doesn’t need to be frequently accessed. That might include medical data that has to be kept for a patient’s entire life, financial regulation data, legal contracts, geologic information that pertains to energy exploration and building plans that cities need to hold onto.Warner Bros. Was keenly interested in helping Microsoft test solutions that might alleviate the costs and inefficiencies associated with storing data over these long time horizons, Colf said.“With the largest content library in the media and entertainment industry by many measures, our challenges are unique in their scale, but they are certainly not unique in terms of the problem we are trying to solve,” she said. Turning digital data into physical artifactsWith a nearly 100-year history in film and television, Warner Bros. Owns one of the world’s deepest and most significant entertainment libraries.
Re-releasing older films in new formats or for new audiences is an important part of the business. It’s also a tremendous cultural responsibility to preserve some of the world’s most beloved stories in perpetuity, Colf said.“Imagine if a title like the ‘Wizard of Oz’ or a show like ‘Friends’ wasn’t available for generation after generation to enjoy and see and understand,” she said. Project Silica’s infrared lasers encode data in “voxels,” the three-dimensional equivalent of the pixels that make up a flat image. Unlike other optical storage media that write data on the surface of something, Project Silica stores data within the glass itself. A 2-mm-thick piece of glass, for instance, can contain more than 100 layers of voxels.Data is encoded in each voxel by changing the strength and orientation of intense laser pulses that physically deform the glass. It’s somewhat like creating upside down icebergs at a nanoscale level, with different depths and sizes and grooves that make them unique.To read the data back, machine learning algorithms decode the patterns created when polarized light shines through the glass. Unlike tape storage – which takes time to spool to get to the place you want to read back – the algorithms can quickly zero in on any point within the glass square, potentially reducing lag time to retrieve information.“If you’re old enough to remember rewinding and forwarding songs on cassette tapes, it can take a while to get to the part you want,” said Richard Black, Microsoft principal research software engineer.
“By contrast, it’s very rapid to read back from glass because you can move simultaneously within the x or y or z axis.”Unlike fragile wine glasses or light bulbs, the squares of quartz glass used for data storage are surprisingly hard to destroy. Early on, the research team tried baking one in an oven at 500 degrees, microwaving, boiling it, scouring it with steel wool. And when they read the data back, it was all still there.That made total sense to the Warner Bros. Archivists, who years ago discovered boxes of Superman radio serials recorded in the 1940s on record-sized pieces of glass.“We actually found players that we could play these things back on, and they were just as good because they were stored on glass. And we were able to digitize and save those wonderful pieces of content,” Collar said.“So now one of our oldest assets in our vault is glass and one of the newest technologies in our vault is glass. And they’re both Superman.
So we really have come full circle,” he said.Top image: Brad Collar, Warner Bros. Senior vice president of global archives and media engineering, left, and Vicky Colf, Warner Bros.
Chief technology officer, demonstrate the contrast between storing films on 22 reels of film versus a coaster-sized piece of glass. Photo by John Brecher for Microsoft. Related:. Listen:. Watch:. Learn more:.
Learn more:Jennifer Langston writes about Microsoft research and innovation. Follow her on.
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