RHIC Computing Facility Crosses the 1 PB Mark

Martin writes "Brookhaven National Lab's RHIC Computing Facility (RCF) announced yesterday that the amount of data from the physics experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) crossed the 1 PetaByte mark. A mail that was sent around to the RCF users contained a GUI screen shot (which is removed from the mail archive) that showed the number of MegaBytes transferred as 1,000,400,143. The RCF web pages have some pictures of the tape silos that hold the data. RHIC and the experiments have been discussed on ./ a few times, look here, here, and here."

Comments

Just how big is a petabyte...

[MissMarvel]

Thanks to the definitions page:

A petabyte is a measure of memory or storage capacity and is 2 to the 50th power bytes or, in decimal, approximately a thousand terabytes.

A terabyte is a measure of computer storage capacity and is 2 to the 40th power or approximately a thousand billion bytes (that is, a thousand gigabytes).

A gigabyte is a measure of computer data storage capacity and is "roughly" a billion bytes. A gigabyte is two to the 30th power, or 1,073,741,824 in decimal notation.

What's bigger?

An exabyte (EB) is a large unit of computer data storage, two to the sixtieth power bytes. The prefix exa means one billion billion, or one quintillion, which is a decimal term. Two to the sixtieth power is actually 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 bytes in decimal, or somewhat over a quintillion (or ten to the eighteenth power) bytes. It is common to say that an exabyte is approximately one quintillion bytes. In decimal terms, an exabyte is a billion gigabytes.

Re:Just how big is a petabyte...

[zelphior]

Actually, data storage isn't measured in base 2. A megabyte is 1,000,000 bytes. The prefix mega indicating 10^6. A gigabyte is 10^9 bytes. A Terabyte is 10^12 bytes. A petabyte is 10^15, or one million billion bytes.

Re:Just how big is a petabyte...

[KnightStalker]

It's probably worth mentioning that of course this is a redefinition of the traditional meanings and will probably irritate the same people who object to the phrase "Native American". But as in that case the traditional usage is entirely wrong. New standards are slowly being adopted. Although I rarely use them myself, I think using "mebi" etc. are preferable to coopting the SI prefixes. (Knuth doesn't like them).