By Mike Keller
On July 16, one pendulum started to swing in Niskayuna, N.Y. Nearly 3,000 miles away, in San Jose, Calif., another weight hung from a fixed point also oscillated back and forth.
The motion of each was slightly off from the other. At one point, software in New York sent a command to equipment attached to the pendulum in California to fix its movement so that the two remote instruments swung identically (see video below).
It sounds like a simple task, says Colin Parris, the vice president of software research at GE. It is anything but. Beyond just the continental divide between the two pendulums, the time it takes for software and equipment to measure movement, analyze position and communicate the data normally introduces delays that make it impossible to get the instruments exactly in sync.
Top image: Machines like GE’s latest 9HA gas turbine will be connected to the Industrial Internet. Surrounding the turbine in GE’s Greenville, SC testing facility are walls of wires. These wires connect to over 6,000 sensors on the turbine, which, during testing, collected 5 terabytes of data - as much information as half the printed collection of the U.S. Library of Congress. Photo by Chris Talbot.
It’s a technical hurdle that needs to be overcome for machines around the world to start talking with each other, a dream embodied in the Industrial Internet.
Such seamless machine-to-machine communication will soon usher in major efficiency and operating improvements in airlines, power generation and other industries that undergird modern life.
To do it, major players in the Industrial Internet space, including GE, Cisco Systems, National Instruments and others, have teamed up to run one of the world’s fastest fiber-optic communications links between New York and California. It will transfer data at an astonishing 100 gigabits per second, enough bandwidth to download 6,000 movies at once. Compare that to the typical home Internet connection that operates at 15 megabits per second, or about 0.0002 as much bandwidth.
Above: Dan Sexton, a project manager at GE Global Research in Niskayuna, NY, is balancing two pendulums located on opposite sides of the U.S. over one of the world’s fastest, high-speed fiber optic lines. Image credit: GE Global Research
The light speed of this data transfer is expected to erase the delay in communication between one system reporting to the other, the current state it is in, where its pendulum weight is located in its oscillation and the velocity and vector the weight is moving.
“We’ve run a very big data fire hose across the country that can deliver all the water needed all at once,” Parris says. “This demonstration has very deep implications–if we can put these pendulums back into sync it means we can optimize the functioning of two remote machines. Once we do that, things will get more profound. First we’ll be able to connect two wind turbines so each knows the exact state of the other in real time. Then we’ll connect 15, and onward.”
A close-up of the technology. Image credit: GE Global Research
Parris says letting big machines talk to each other instantaneously involves tons more data than when people talk on the phone. And in the future, when more machines are connected to each other through the Internet, the information superhighway will need even more lanes.
“We’re not talking about a few kilobytes of data here, we’re talking about thousands of times that amount,” he says. “In the future, billions of systems—wind turbines, jet engines, people, computers and machines coming together—will be moving exabytes of data around the world all at the same time.”
The pendulum demonstration is part of the Industrial Internet Consortium, a group of 180 corporate and public members in 24 countries dedicated to accelerating innovation in connected, intelligent machines and processes.