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6.7 Meter Telescope To Capture 30 Terabytes Per Night
Lumenary7204 writes "The Register has a story about the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, a project to build a 6.7 meter effective-diameter ground-based telescope that will be used to map some of the faintest objects in the night sky. Jeff Kantor, the LSST Project Data Manager, indicates that the telescope should be in operation by 2016, will generate around 30 terabytes of data per night, and will 'open a movie-like window on objects that change or move on rapid timescales: exploding supernovae, potentially hazardous near-Earth asteroids, and distant Kuiper Belt Objects.' The end result will be a 150 petabyte database containing one of the most detailed surveys of the universe ever undertaken by a ground-based telescope. The telescope's 8.4 meter mirror blank was recently unveiled at the University of Arizona's Mirror Lab in Tucson."
This project was presented at the MySQL Users Conference 2008 in a dedicated talk and a keynote.
The storage will be organized in clusters based on MySQL databases.
Astronomy, Petabytes, and MySQL
The Science and Fiction of Petascale Analytics
30 TB per night sounds like a lot, but 1.5 TB drives are about AUD 350 each, retail. By 2016, I'd expect vendors to have released at least a 10 TB hard drive at that price point, and I wouldn't be surprised if we're using 30 to 50 TB drives.
So it all boils down to about $1000 per night of operation, or about $350K per year. Not exactly expensive for a science project. A single mars mission costs about $300M, but this telescope would generate more discoveries. That's not even considering that storage costs would continue to drop over the lifetime of the telescope, so the eventual total cost may be less than $100K per year. That's the salary of just one person!