![]() The first camera is at the starting blocks. Suppose you have two cameras to record images for a 100-meter dash, each with its own internal clock. What is causality? It is easiest to explain through an example. Otherwise it violates a concept called causality. For all the software to work, however, all the machines must be synchronized. Software engineers now make careers writing code that enables horizontal scaling. ![]() In this configuration, the cluster essentially functions as one giant machine, hence the size and speed of the system now becomes limited by the physical size of a data center rather than by the size of an atom. The architects employed horizontal scaling in a data center with distributed databases, where instead of an entire database residing on one server, the database is distributed over multiple servers in a cluster. This explosive growth in the volume of data - coupled with the speed at which the data must be written, read, copied, analyzed, manipulated and backed up - required data-center architects to find a way around the end of Moore’s Law. Exabyte databases managing more than 100,000 transactions per second (a transaction consists of multiple operations) are currently in use, and the size of the databases and the transactions per second will continue to grow for the foreseeable future. ![]() With the advent of the internet of things (IoT), streaming services, social media posts and autonomous self-driving cars, the amount of data generated every day continues to increase exponentially. In essence, you could think of the atom as the ultimate court that struck down the law.īut while Moore’s Law will come to an end, the thirst for increased processing power will continue to grow. At this scale, the size and quantum properties of atoms and free electrons significantly prohibit further size reduction. With wafer fabrication now in the sub-10-nm technology nodes, the transistor sizes are only about 10 to 50 times that of a silicon atom. Unfortunately, Moore’s Law is rapidly coming to an end due to a limit imposed by physics. (Image: Microchip Technology) The Demise of Moore’s Law Satirical image of an engineer trying to keep up with Moore’s Law. Cell phones, financial trading and DNA mapping are all applications that rely heavily on the number of operations per second a microprocessor can execute, which is closely tied to the transistor count on a chip. It may have been hard in 1965 to imagine there would be any real-world need to have a semiconductor with 50 billion transistors on it in 2021, but as semiconductor technologies kept up with the law, so did application demands. Along with this increase in transistor density came an important increase in speed as well as decreases in cost and power consumption. This was eventually revised to doubling every two years. In 1965, Gordon Moore predicted the transistor count on an integrated circuit would double every year. The quantum nature of an atom enables the precision time and is a critical part of ensuring that more data at faster speeds will be processed in the future - ironic, as just a few years ago the quantum nature of the atom was seen as the ultimate death of this increase in data processing and speed. This high level of synchronization is vital to ensure the zettabytes of data collected around the globe every year can be meaningfully stored and used in many applications, whether due to system requirements or to ensure regulatory compliance. ![]() The atomic clock time transmitted via Global Position System (GPS) and other Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) networks is synchronizing servers across the globe, and atomic clocks are deployed in individual data centers to preserve synchronization when the transmitted time is not available. T iming from atomic clocks is now an integral part of data-center operations. GNSS constellations are precise timing systems. ![]()
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