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

Re:Just how big is a petabyte...

[A55M0NKEY]

Avogadro's number is approx 600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms per mol. If you were to store an an exabyte of data in one mol of material then each byte would have a budget of about 600,000 atoms. That may be doable...

Re:Just how big is a petabyte...

[NonSequor]

But it has to do with more than marketing. That's just a fortunate coincidence which they are more than happy to make use of. Base 2 measurements are used for RAM because most RAM produced holds a power of 2 number of bytes. This is not true for many other storage devices, including hard disks.

Personally, I think that defining a kilobyte as 1024 bytes is only useful very little of the time. In general it is less convenient than displaying units in terms of the number system that we have been taught to use since we were young.

The ultimate goal of any software designer should be to make the software conform to the user's whims. Too often people lose sight of that and adapt themselves to the computer's arbitrary needs instead.