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Google's Academic TB Swap Project
eldavojohn writes "Google is transferring data the old fashioned way — by mailing hard drive arrays around to collect information and then sending copies to other institutions. All in the name of science & education. From the article, 'The program is currently informal and not open to the general public. Google either approaches bodies that it knows has large data sets or is contacted by scientists themselves. One of the largest data sets copied and distributed was data from the Hubble telescope — 120 terabytes of data. One terabyte is equivalent to 1,000 gigabytes. Mr. DiBona said he hoped that Google could one day make the data available to the public.'"
This is absolutely the most cost effective way of transferring large amounts of data like this. If you do the calculations on terrabyte size files, sneakernet (of FedEx net) is actually faster and less expensive. We also went to one of Jim Grey's seminars when he was here giving an Organick Memorial Lecture and he made an incredibly compelling demonstration using a variety of data types. We ended up talking with him for some time after about new projects we are engaging in that will also be generating terrabytes of data and his suggestion was to pass applications rather than data which was interesting.
This is becoming more and more the norm in scientific research and Google's work is quite welcome.
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umm a terabyte is really 1 terabyte. Though 1 terabyte = 1024 gigabytes not 1000... but whatever.
"Is that dad? Either that or Batman's really let himself go."
FedEx delivered what appeared to be a ton of broken office chairs to Google headquarters this morning. When asked for the sender's ID, the severely beaten FedEx courier would only reply that the sender wished to remain anonymous.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Moe: Say, Barn, uh, remember when I said I'd have to send away to NASA to calculate your bar tab?
Barney: Oh ho, oh yeah, you had a good laugh, Moe.
Moe: The results came back today. (reading a printout) You owe me seventy billion dollars.
Barney: Huh?
Moe: No, wait, wait, wait, that's for the Voyager spacecraft. Your tab is fourteen billion dollars.
Why?
Why is a Kilobyte 1024 bytes, if "Kilo" means 1000, both according to the SI and the greeks (Kilo is derived from khilioi). If 1 kg = 1000g, 1 kV = 1000V, 1 km = 1000m, why should hard disks break the pattern?
When we're talking about addressable computer memory, approximating the kilobyte to 1024 is a convenience, but since Terabyte gives such a huge error, and makes absolutely no sense for data transfer or disk sizes, it's really time we stopped this illogical naming convention just because some engineers found a term convenient 40 years ago.
I'm so tired of this stuff. Byte me!
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
- the item goes into a big bag (by itself, not mixed with other items) with red/white stripes, so employess know not to mess with it)
- it gets hand-carted to the destination truck, and is the last thing to be loaded, and first unloaded
- only seasoned workers ever touch your package, and generally care about the state that it's in
- finally, they are good about paying up if the item arrives damaged.
did I forget to include ???? and Profit!"Hate is baggage. Life's too short to be pissed off all the time." Danny Vinyard -American History X