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Fermilab Builds 500-Megapixel Camera
heyitsme writes "Fermilab, a U.S. Department of Energy research lab, is part of a collaboration on an experiment to measure the properties of dark energy. The Dark Energy Survey would measure the history of the expansion rate of the universe more precisely than ever before, using the largest camera ever built with Charge Coupled Devices (CCD). The 500 megapixel Dark Energy Camera (DECam) would be placed on an existing 4-meter telescope located in north-central Chile at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory's Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. The DECam together with the CTIO 4-meter telescope will allow for a survey of 15 percent of the sky to light levels faint enough to measure the colors of galaxies at redshift one."
I believe that, but I've always had trouble with the cost of moving data around the Internet. I mean, it's not like fibre optic cable wears out faster the more bits you push through it. It seems to be more about supply/demand than any "real" factors.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
I call BS, I can get a gigabit pipe in any major city for 10k a month. Assuming I just have two points I need to move data to thats 20k a month and I'm staying on the same backbone provider so I have contractual levverage is I cant get the throughput inside the one backbone. I can move 1TB is 8000+ seconds aka less than 3 hours. It takes nearly a day to get from LA to London as well with a ticket cost of what 2k on expedia booked a month out for an overnight trip. If you have to move a TB a day thats 60k in flights. FedEX is cheaper by far but so is provisioning a lamda on fiber and runnign your own routers. A hundred meagabit pipe is only a couple k for the two ends and moves a TB in a day about the same cost as the one plane ticket.
Tapes have there place and for this instance it might make sence not to dump the capital into running fiber out but I would think it would since a telescope isnt a short term project. Tapes are good at getting data to different endpoints since fedex goes just about everywhere. The other thing you have to consider is accademics writing papers generaly dont have a clue how to find a good price on bandwith most people dont, companies are still selling at the 200+ a meg pricepoint when they have competiors in the teens. Bandwith is an artificial market controled by telco's with a very low real costs.
No sir I dont like it.
Well, sure. But what if you only need to move 1 TB? On 1 day?
Until you remember that you have to pay someone to feed the hundreds of tapes into drives to copy the data to disk and that you'd have to buy and run well over 10 drives in order to get the bandwidth of a 10Gbit connection and a lot more into order to beat that bandwidth. I think if you worked out the cost and time disk-to-disk the result would be more favourable toward the network scenario.