May 29, 2007

• A little sci-fi “what if” for ya

  I was talking to a friend of mine about what it would take to download the internet into an accessible storage medium.  We figure that would take several hundred Yottabytes.  So I figured, what if we took it a step further…

  
  

  2015 – Project “Mercury Mine” is approved by NASA to begin mining the precious metals from Mercury’s core.

  
  

  2018 – Project “Mercury Mine” is underway at full steam.  New caches of metal is shipped from Mercury to Earth at a regular pace.

  
  

  2020 – DataHive, Inc. is founded and is open for business.

  
  

  2021 – DataHive, Inc. presents to Congress a proposal for a massive data collection project.  The project is dubbed “Heaven’s Doorstep”.  The goal of Heaven’s Doorstep is to compile, and make available to all the people of the world, all recorded knowledge of mankind throughout history, up through the completion of the project.  The means of storing all this data would be a massive Beowulf Cluster which would sit on a space platform, cooled by the vacuum of space, on the dark side of the moon, and connected to the Earth via a network of sattelites.  Completion date is approximated to be around 2060.

  
  

  2022 – Funding is granted by US Congress to begin project Heaven’s Doorstep.

  
  

  2023 – Technology vendors began making bids to include their products in the nodes.
  -IBM won the bid to develop a blade workstation case design to reduce the amount of space used by each node, and would provide a 450 watt power supply for each node.
  -Intel won the bid to use their newest line of 256 core processors named “Penultimate”, and as such the motherboards were also produced by Intel, using shorter busses and integrated RAM, co-developed by Kingston.  AMD’s CEO was furious, and attempted to sue Intel and DataHive, but the lawsuit was thrown out as frivolous.
  -Maxtor won the bid to use a new development in HDD technology, a self enclosed solid state hard disk drive (SESSHDD), which would ensure that the vacuum of space would not interfere with the inner workings of the disk drive.  Seagate came in a close second, wanting to use the newest innovations in SATA disk drive technology.
  -Kingston won the bid to use their latest developments in RAM technology, 4gb SDDR/Flash chips which was integrated in with Intel’s motherboards.
  -AMD, regardless of the frivolous lawsuit, won the bid to use their newest ATI Radeon video cards, the Radeon 16650 with 2TB of integrated video RAM.
  -3Com won the bid to develop a networking technique to connect all the nodes together, using a new technique specific to “outer space networking” called CatSW.  CatSW uses ions captured from the solar winds as a transmission medium between the nodes and the routers.
  -Cisco won the bid to produce routers that would work in conjunction with 3Com’s CatSW technology.
  -IBM won the bid to develop the server cluster that would act as the head node, using Intel’s new Penultimate processors and Maxtor’s SESSHDD’s.  They developed a cluster server in which each node would act as a failover in the even that a server would fail.
  -Veritas won the bid to provide a backup system which was a disk backup, using another cluster of machines using Intel’s Penultimate processors and the largest SESSHDD’s that Maxtor could provide.
  -Microsoft, to everyone’s surprise, won the bid to provide the operating system AND the database software.  In a rare move that won them the bid, Microsoft volunteered the software licenses, at no cost.  The servers would be running MS’s new OS Windows Eon Server Farm Edition and the nodes would run Windows Eon Cluster Edition.  Each server and node would be running MS’s latest SQL software, SQL Server 2020 Enterprise Edition.  The Open Source Community was shocked.
  -Network Associates, Inc. won the bid to provide a firewall, antihacker, and antivirus technology for the nodes and servers.  Symantec, in response, made a scathing press release denouncing the entire project.
  -Google, Inc. won the bid to provide searching technologies.  No one was surprised, really.
  -Northrop Grumman, as contracted by NASA, developed the sattelite network which would connect the Earth to Heaven’s Doorstep.  The sattelites would use a combination of 3Com’s CatSW and the latest developments in “line of sight” laser transmission medium.  Two large sattelite dishes would be erected in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans which would provide the connection from the Earth’s internet to Heaven’s Doorstep.  Microsoft is given a private sattelite that would directly connect their Microsoft Update servers to the cluster.

  
  

  2024 – Technical details are developed for each node and server.
  -Each node consists of a blade workstation running an Intel Penultimate processor, 4gb of RAM, a RAID 6 array of 4 100tb SESSHDD’s, with two 3Com CatSW network cards with a failover configuration, and running Windows Eon Cluster Edition.
  -The nodes are connected together using the CatSW transmission medium to the rows of racks of Cisco routers, which connect to the head node, the cluster of IBM Blade Servers.
  -The head node is comprised of a cluster of servers running a matrix of 4 Intel Penultimate processors, 8gb of RAM, two RAID 6 arrays of 4 200tb SESSHDD’s, connected to the backbone with two of 3Com’s CatSW network cards, running Windows Eon Server Farm Edition and MS SQL Server 2020 Enterprise Edition, and Google’s Search Server software.
  -The head node is backed up by another cluster of servers similar to the head node, which is running Veritas 2020 as the backup software.
  -The whole thing is connected to the sattelite network via a sattelite dish using the networks own line of sight laser transmission medium.

  
  

  2025 – A massive donation campaign is launched, as the amount of money that was granted by the US Government was simply not enough.  Technology vendors, corporations, philanthropists, charities, and individuals alike send in a massive amount of money and support.

  
  

  2026 – Construction of the space platform, sattelites and computers begins.

  
  

  2035 – Construction is completed and the space platform is moved into position behind the moon.  Temperatures on the platform drop to near absolute zero.

  
  

  2036 – The computers are launched to the platform on an undisclosed number of separate space shuttle missions.

  
  

  2037 – The network of sattelites is put into orbit.

  
  

  2038 – The beowulf cluster is assembled, the head node is assembled, and the head node’s backup is assembled.

  
  

  2039 – The beowulf cluster’s nodes are upgraded to the latest version of Windows – Windows Infinity.

  
  

  2041 – A massive data collection movement begins.  Everything that has ever been written, video’d, podcasted, or otherwise recorded is uploaded into the massive database on Heaven’s Doorstep.

  
  

  2042 – Heaven’s Doorstep is made accessible to the public for the people to not only search the current database, but to upload anything that they can.

  
  

  2055 – Heaven’s Doorstep project is complete, five years early from it’s approximated completion date.  All recorded information from the first human writings to the last news article of 2055 is uploaded into the massive database.  The size of the database is approximately 900yb.  It is the largest technological undertaking in the history of mankind.

  
  

   

  
  

  It’s fun to dream.

  • 12:55 pm
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