APPLICATIONS

There are many possible applications of holographic memory. Holographic memory systems can potentially provide the high-speed transfers and large volumes of future computer systems.
PARALLELISM: In conventional storage, data is recorded and retrieved serially. Holographic storage, on the other hand, uses the information capacity of an optical wave-front so that data can be recorded and retrieved in parallel, one page at a time. Due to the page-oriented nature of holographic storage, the potential exists for extremely high data rates, subject only to the limitations imposed by I / O (input/output) devices. Holographic storage systems can have data rates approaching 1.0 Gbytes / sec. In addition, because beam deflection, as opposed to moving parts, is used to access the stored holograms, access times in the 10-ms range could be achieved. Hence searching can be very fast since it uses parallel search.
DATAMINING: One possible application is data mining. Data mining is the process of finding patterns in large amounts of data. Data mining is used greatly in large databases which hold possible patterns which cannot be distinguished by human eyes due to the vast amount of data. Some current computer systems implement data mining, but the mass amount of storage required is pushing the limits of current data storage systems. The many advances in access times and data storage capacity that holographic memory provides could exceed conventional storage and speed up data mining considerably. This would result in more located patterns in a shorter amount of time.

PETAFLOP COMPUTING: Another possible application of holographic memory is in petaflop computing. A petaflop is a thousand trillion floating point operations per second. The fast access in extremely large amounts of data provided by holographic memory systems could be utilized in a petaflop architecture. Clearly advances are needed in more than memory systems, but the theoretical schematics do exist for such a machine. Optical storage such as holographic memory provide a viable solution to the extreme amount of data which is required for petaflop computing.