IBM’s small movie is perfect for Big Data

July 3, 2013

Why the world’s smallest movie is good news for big data

You wouldn’t think that IBM’s announcement that is had made the world’s smallest movie using atoms would have much impact on the business world – but you couldn’t be more wrong!

Using an IBM-invented scanning tunnelling microscope the individual atoms were moved to create 242 single frames that were rendered into still images to create the movie. This study of materials at the nanoscale does have a serious impact though as it helps to explore the limits of data storage.

Computer circuits have been shrinking towards atomic dimensions for years (in accordance with Moore’s law) but chip designers are now coming up against physical imitations with traditional techniques of design and manufacture.

All the movies ever made on a finger nail size device

By using a single atom (the smallest object available for data storage) the same team of IBM researchers who made this movie also recently created the world’s smallest magnetic bit.

They were able to work out it takes 12 atoms to reliably store one bit of magnetic information. By comparison, it takes roughly 1 million atoms to store a bit of data on a modern computer or electronic device.

If commercialised, this atomic memory could one day store all of the movies ever made in a device the size of a fingernail. The same techniques are also being used to come up with new computing architectures all of which is good news for those of us involved in big data.