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Linux Breaks 100 Petabyte Ceiling

Posted by timothy on from the no-stick-is-large-enough-to-shake dept.

*no comment* writes: "Linux has broken the barrier with the 100 petabyte ceiling, and doing it at 144 petabytes." And this is even more impressive in pebibytes, too.

5 of 330 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Ok... by astrophysics · · Score: 3, Insightful

    There are about 10^10 solar masses of mass in a large galaxy like our own. At ~10^33 g/ solar maxx, and 10^23 atoms per gram, That's 10^66~2^219 particles in our galaxy. Beleive me, scientists will make use of as much computing power, RAM, and storage space as they can get their hands on. If only the limiting factor were operating system limitations rather than the more practicalities realities of funding and costs of hardware.

  2. OK this is great... by TheMMaster · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Now, I can really imagine someone that buys a 144Pb drive (array) and will use IDE?? I would personally go for SCSI there ;-)

    What I am really wondering is: is there at the current moment ANY company/application/whatever that required this amount of storage? I thought that even a large bank could manage with a few TB's
    Not intended as a flame, just interested

    but still, this is a Good Thing (r)

    --
    Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity
  3. 144 PB, not really by tap · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Sounds like all they are saying is that the new
    IDE driver can support 48 bit addressing. With 2^48 seconds of 512 bytes, you get 144 PB. But there are a LOT of other barriers to huge filesystems or files.

    For instance, the Linux SCSI driver has always support 32 bit addressing, good enough for 2 terabytes on a single drive. But until recently, you couldn't have a file larger than 2 gigabytes (1024x smaller) in Linux. I think that the ext2 filesystem still has a limit of 4 TB for a single partition.

    So while the IDE driver may be able to deal with a hard drive 144 PB in size, you would still have to chop it into 4 TB partition.

  4. Re:Somebody will probably correct me ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Of course, this was probably salescrap. Does anyone know the truth on this?

    The BABAR experiment at SLAC is using Objectivity for data storage. Unfortunately, I cannot find a publicly available web page about computing at BABAR right now.

    The amount of data BABAR produces is in the order of magnitude of 10's of terabytes per year (maybe a hundered), and even storing this amount in Objectivity is not without problems. The LHC, which is currently under construction, will generate much more data than BABAR, but even if they reach 10 petabytes per year one day, I very much doubt that they will be able to store this in Objectivity.

  5. 1.44 petabytes is half a lifetime by mrogers · · Score: 5, Insightful
    The size of information storage devices and the bandwidth of networks are approaching meaningful limits: the size and bandwidth of human experience. Tor Norretranders claims in his book The User Illusion that the amount of information absorbed by the senses is around 11 Mbits per second. In other words, a totally immersive virtual experience with sight, sound, smell, taste, touch and motion could be transmitted over a standard Ethernet connection. An entire day of a human life could be recorded in perfect detail (with no compression) on a 120 GB disk. So there is a limit to how much information you could ever want to store. In your entire life you will experience less than 3.5 petabytes of information. 1.44 petabytes will never seem small to a human being.

    However, there might one day be information processing systems to which 1.44 petabytes is a small amount of information. In a sense, these systems will have a richer experience of the world than human beings. I wonder if human consciousness would seem marvellous or valuable to such a machine.