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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."

3 of 51 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Just how big is a petabyte... by zelphior · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

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    If you can read this then I forgot to check "Post Anonymously"
  2. Weeee by NanoGator · · Score: 4, Funny

    "RHIC Computing Facility Crosses the 1 PB Mark"

    Tomorrow's story:

    "RHIC Computing Facility Slashdotted, Crosses the 2 PB Mark." Some will complain of dupes, others will say RTFA.

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    "Derp de derp."
  3. Re:Just how big is a petabyte... by KnightStalker · · Score: 4, Informative

    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).

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    * And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."