What To Do With A Petabyte Of Storage
OK, this is going to be a quick post. Work’s been hectic, and family and summer fun have taken its toll.
Nevertheless, I wanted to make the time to suggest an interesting article to read. In the July 2008 issue of Wired Magazine there’s an article titled: The Petabyte Age
(https://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_intro). The article discusses how our access to data, vast quantities of data, will change the way science is done. The article gives numerous interesting examples: how huge amounts of historical crop yield data, satellite pictures, and weather data can be merged to very accurately predict future yields, and how the automated analysis of night-sky telescopes pictures are being studied to discover objects no one has had time to discover (the article sites the example of an asteroid zooming in on earth like the one that stuck the planet and supposedly caused the extinction of the dinosaurs).
Below find a few little factoids from Wired Magazine that give you a greater feel of some real world phenomena’s that are utilizing huge amounts of data.
1 Terabyte
$200 hard drive that holds 260,000 songs
20 Terabytes
Photos uploaded to Facebook each month
120 Terabytes
All the data and images collected by the Hubble space telescope.
330 Terabytes
Data that the large Hadron collider will produce each week.
460 Terabytes
All the digital weather data compiled by the National Climate Data Center.
530 Terabytes
All the videos on YouTube.
600 Terabytes
Ancestry.com’s genealogy database (includes all the US census records 1790 – 2000).
1 Petabyte
Data processed by Google’s servers every 72 minutes.
Go read the article; it’s truly fascinating and stretches your thinking in terms of how computers and data will be used in the future. And if you’re like me, keeps you excited about being an IT guy.
I welcome your comments.
Mike Brannan
