"There's no way they could store all that information"
http://www.techworld.com/storage/news/index.cfm?NewsID=2430But what, you ask, can deal with that overwhelming mass of data that helps our government spy on the world? And how does it work?
Well, a Texas Memory Systems SAM product - a combined solid-state disk (SSD) and DSP (digital signal processor). Woody Hutsell, an executive VP at TMS, said: "Fifty percent of our revenue this year will come from DSP systems, more than last year. The systems are a combination of SSD with DSP ASICs." ASICs are application-specific integrated circuits - chips dedicated to a specific purpose.
TMS has a TM-44 DSP chip which has 8 GFLOPS of processing power - that's eight billion floating point operations per second. The processing uses floating point arithmatic operations to supply the accuracy needed for the analysis. A DSP chip turns analogue signals from a sensor or recorder into digital information usable by a computer. Digital cameras will use a DSP to turn the light signals coming through the lens into digital picture element, or pixel, information.
A SAM-650 product is called a 192 GFLOPS DSP supercomputer by TMS. It is just 3U high and has 24 DSP chips and is positioned as a back-end number cruncher controlled by any standard server - a similar architecture to that used by Cray supercomputers. There are vast streams of information coming from recorded telephone conversations. The ability to have the DSPs work in parallel speeds up analysis enormously. Spinning hard drives can't feed the DSPs fast enough, nor are they quick enough for subsequent software analysis of the data. Consequently TMS uses its solid state technology to provide a buffer up to 32GB that keeps the DSPs operating at full speed.
A cluster of five SAM-650's provides a terra flop of processing power; one trillion floating point operations per second.
32 gigabytes of RAM is a lot of telephone bandwidth, which means alot of concurrent phone calls.
http://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/ic2000/ic2000.htm here's another link, from the report to the EU Parliament back in 2000 on Echelon.
These are the statistics on the fastest
known supercomputer in the world, BlueGene/L owned by the DOE. It has 131,072 processors. And it is capable of between 280,000 and 367,000 GFLOPS!!
System Name BlueGene/L
Site DOE/NNSA/LLNL
System Family IBM BlueGene/L
System Model eServer Blue Gene Solution
Computer eServer Blue Gene Solution
Vendor IBM
URL http://www.research.ibm.com/bl...
Application area Not Specified
Main Memory 32768 GB
Installation Year 2005
Performance/Linpack Data
Processors 131072
Rmax(GFlops) 280600
Rpeak(GFlops) 367000
http://www.top500.org/system/7747I only post blueGene/L as a comparison of "state of the art" supercomputer capabilites vs. what the technical requirements would be for recording every transatlantic phone call, fax, email etc.