Slashdot Mirror
SKA Telescope To Provide a Billion PCs Worth of Processing
Sharky2009 writes "IBM is researching an exaflop machine with the processing power of about one billion PCs. The machine will be used to help process the Exabyte of data per day expected to flow off the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescope project. The company is also researching solid state storage technology called 'racetrack memory' which is much faster and denser than flash and may hold the secret to storing the data from the SKA. The story also says that the SKA is unlikely to use grid computing or a cloud-based approach to processing the telescope data due to challenge in transferring so much data (about one thousand million 1Gb memory sticks each day)."
Seriously, how is a PC a unit of processing ability? And one thousand million GB sticks is an Exabyte (hence the name). Perhaps you can just say 10^18 bytes. This is slashdot, not msnbc.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
First of all, no one would be using manual storage to transfer the data.
Just throw up some numbers that makes sense to us. Like 99,420.5393 gigabit/second.
Most large ISPs use OC-192 as the backbones of their infrastructure. You'd need more than 10,200 of those to handle that data load, and that's ignoring the overhead.
Or to put it into numbers that the RIAA can understand: 1.5707309 * 10^9 music CDs every single day.
At 15 pieces of music per CD and $80,000/song that's $1.88 * 10^15 dollars/day flowing through that network. That's 632 times larger than the US federal budget for 2008.
No wonder the music industry is in trouble!
Here's the way it works:
In the US and the UK, the number is officially called "billion." In India, it's called "100 Crore." Australia officially has no idea how they do their numbers, and Canada doesn't even know what language it speaks. There are no other English-speaking countries of consequence.
Therefore, "billion" is the most acceptable term for international English-language writing.
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