In the United States, a university professor and his students have developed the first chip based on machine learning to optimize storage and display on hard drives. This AI allows for more capacity and lower latency when accessing data.
With more and more data, mechanical hard drives remain the true workhorses of high-tech. More storage capacity is always needed, especially in the cloud. Whether using the apps of a smartphone or connected gadget, or managing what the sensors collect in a city or industry, nothing can work without a real-time readout of this data, and an artificial intelligence finds itself grinding. in the void.
The concern is that a hard drive is ultimately quite rudimentary. The data gets piled up there anyway and is sparsely stored anywhere in memory. Despite fast hard drives, the time to access this sometimes essential data remains problematic, especially when this data is stored in the cloud.
So the obvious idea is to improve performance by optimizing storage. Easy to say, but doing is more complicated. In any case, this is the challenge launched by a researcher from the University of Carnegie Mellon in Pennsylvania, in the United States, with his students.
Decrease latency, increase storage capacity
To achieve this, they developed a chip to analyze the data to directly optimize their storage. The technology is based on artificial intelligence that learns itself how to better manage information to optimize its storage and reading. On a regular hard drive, the data recorded on the magnetic layer is identified through signal processing technology. With the amplification of AI, the storage process is optimized, with less storage space loss, and performance suffers.
Ultimately, even in the cloud, latency for call data can be reduced with this process. This chip, based on a neural network, should arrive in the university’s lab in the form of a physical prototype before the end of the year. This potentially revolutionary development is being closely watched by hard disk manufacturers who even say they are surprised that a university lab was able to make such a prototype.