Microsoft Project HSD

2020: The announcement of Project HSD - the holographic cloud storage

At the end of September, 2020 Microsoft company submitted the HSD project, a new initiative of a research of opportunities holographic cloud storage for a cloud. Though this idea appeared in the 1960th, Microsoft considers that right now holographic memory will be able to replace hard drives.

Holographic storages work by means of record and data reading from an optical crystal. As it is the three-dimensional data medium, it allows to keep a large number of data in one crystal with a possibility of rewriting. From the technical point of view this solution cheaper, than a flash storage, both more reliable and fast, than hard drives.

However creation of holographic storage requires difficult optics. According to creators of the HSD project, a key component for improvement of holographic memory — implementation of technology of cameras with high resolution from the industry of smartphones.

Microsoft provided holographic the cloud storage

Now we can use standard cameras with high resolution and modern methods of deep learning to transfer slozhnovypolnimy optical tasks from a mechanical equipment to the digital area, - researchers of Microsoft explain. - It allows us to use simpler and cheap optics without approval of pixels and to compensate the arising optical distortions using normal equipment and the software.

Though Project HSD still is only the research project, he can make eventually holographic data warehouses real. First of all developers intend to achieve high access rate to several fragments of a crystal at once. Thus they will be able to scale the capacity of storage and to make it practical for use in a cloud.^[1]

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