IBM Building 120PB Cluster Out of 200,000 Hard Disks

MrSeb writes "Smashing all known records by some margin, IBM Research Almaden, California, has developed hardware and software technologies that will allow it to strap together 200,000 hard drives to create a single storage cluster of 120 petabytes — 120 million gigabytes. The data repository, which currently has no name, is being developed for an unnamed customer, but with a capacity of 120PB, it's most likely use will be a storage device for a governmental (or Facebook) supercomputer. With IBM's GPFS (General Parallel File System), over 30,000 files can be created per second — and with massive parallelism, and no doubt thanks to the 200,000 individual drives in the array, single files can be read or written at several terabytes per second."

Comments

Fill 'er up

[mmarlett]

All I know is that if you put it on my computer, I'll have it filled in two years and have no idea what's actually on it.

Re:Not done yet

[S.O.B.]

Punch cards.

Not the government.

[girlintraining]

It's not the government guys, at least not the cloak and dagger kind. They're too paranoid to let you know how much data they can store. They also don't want you to know that even with all that data, they're still only able to utilize a fraction of it. People are still going through WWII wire intercepts *today*. No, the problem in the intelligence community is making the data useful and organized as efficiently as possible, not collecting it.

That leaves only one real option: Scientific research. Look at how much data the Hadron Supercollider produces in a day. ..

Re:Not the government.

[DrgnDancer]

This is generally something I have a hard time convincing people of. I've worked for spooky organizations. Not at the highest levels or on the most secret projects, but in the general vicinity. The government is not monitoring you. Not because they lack the legal capability (though they do, and that is mostly, but not always, respected), but because they lack the technical ability. There are only so many analysts, only so much computer time, only so much storage. Except in cases of explicit corruption or misuse of resource, those analysts, that computer time, and that storage is not being wasted on monitoring Joe and Jane average.

I'm not going to say that there aren't abuses by the people who have access to some of this stuff; they are human and weak like the rest of us and are often tempted to take advantage of their situation I'm sure. In general however, unless you've done something that got a warrant issued for your information, the government doesn't care. They just don't have the resources to be big brother, even if they want to be.

Re:Depressing

[PPH]

Facebook and presumably a spy agency?

You're repeating yourself.

Re:Paranoid much?

[Anonymous Coward]

modern gernome compression techniques only store the edits needed to convert the reference genome to your genome. And the diff file is just around 24 MB per person. I am an ex-bioinformatician.

Re:What's it for?

[Given M. Sur]

What's it for? No surprise, domestic spying.

I think you mean "protecting your freedoms, fellow patriot."

Re:What's it for?

[erroneus]

Yes, he's an admitted petaphyle.