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IBM's High Performance File System

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the but-who-will-use-it dept.

HoosierPeschke writes "BetaNews is running a story about IBM's new file system, General Parallel File System (GPFS). The short and skinny is that the new file system attained a 102 Gigabyte per second transfer rate. The size of the file system is also astonishing at 1.6 petabytes (petabyte == 1,024 terabytes). IBM has up a page with more information and specs on the system.."

3 of 208 comments (clear)

  1. Re: 10 Tbytes? by chris_eineke · · Score: 4, Insightful
    relatively small ( 10Tbytes) file systems
    Seagate recently released a 500GB hard-drive. It costs $431.99CAD. 2 of them makes 1 TB. 2000 makes 1 PB. (Yes, that's overly simplified because it doesn't take into account interconnection cost, cooling, hydro, &c.)

    2000 x 431.99 = $863,980CAD

    I don't think that that's a lot of money for a petabyte raid. Hell, you might even get a 20% discount. Now think back about 20 years. That sum of money could have bought you 1 GB - that is an order of magnitude less in hard drive space. But here is the kicker:
    Approx. 20 years down the road you will get at least two magnitudes more for the same amount of money (wo/ inflation). Why? Because approx. 30 years ago, that sum of money bought you 1 MB of space.

    Ray Kurweil calls it the "Law of Accelerating Returns". 20 years down the road I will call it my petaporn array . Or maybe better not. ;)
    --
    "All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog." Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
  2. binary prefixes by Lord+Ender · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The submitter and editors need to learn their numeric prefixes. Come on! This web site is supposed to be for people who understand computer technology!

    A petabyte == 1000 terrabytes
    A pebibyte == 1024 terrabytes

    Please see the NIST definition page:
    http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html

    --
    A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
  3. SCREW THAT!!! ;-) by Ossifer · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Do you even read your own links?

    the exact number in common practice could be either one of the following:
    • 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes -- 1000^5, or 10^15.
    • 1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes -- 1024^5, or 2^50.

    Real geeks use powers of two; powers of ten we're only introduced for marketing purposes, which real geeks eschew.