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The Black Hole Image Data Was Spread Across 5 Petabytes Stored On About Half a Ton of Hard Drives (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: On Wednesday, an international team of scientists published the first image of a black hole ever. It looked like a SpaghettiO, and yet the image was an incredible scientific achievement that gave humanity a glimpse of one of the universe's most destructive forces and confirmed long-held theories -- namely, that black holes exist. Storing the raw data for the image was a feat itself -- tiny portions of data spread across five petabytes stored on multiple hard drives, the equivalent of 5,000 years worth of MP3s. Katie Bouman, a computer scientist and assistant professor at the California Institute of Technology, led the development of the algorithm that imaged the black hole. An image of her posing with some of the data drives went viral as observers praised her success.
The massive amounts of data were essential to creating the image of the black hole. Bouman and other scientists coordinated radio telescopes all over the Earth, each pointed at the black hole and gathering data at different times. The data scientists then pieced this information together and used an algorithm to fill in the blanks and generate a likely image of the black hole. The five petabytes of data took up such a massive amount of digital and physical space it couldn't be sent over the internet. Instead, the hard drives were flown to processing centers in Germany and Boston where the data was assembled. On Reddit's /r/datahoarder subreddit, a community dedicated to spreading the passion of hoarding vast amounts of data, the drives were bigger news than the scientific achievement itself.
The massive amounts of data were essential to creating the image of the black hole. Bouman and other scientists coordinated radio telescopes all over the Earth, each pointed at the black hole and gathering data at different times. The data scientists then pieced this information together and used an algorithm to fill in the blanks and generate a likely image of the black hole. The five petabytes of data took up such a massive amount of digital and physical space it couldn't be sent over the internet. Instead, the hard drives were flown to processing centers in Germany and Boston where the data was assembled. On Reddit's /r/datahoarder subreddit, a community dedicated to spreading the passion of hoarding vast amounts of data, the drives were bigger news than the scientific achievement itself.
The Black Hole pic is useless - cure cancer, make fusion real, do something useful. but that fucking black hole picture is fake shit of a never to be visited place 55 million light years away.
shit.
Let's start measuring storage space by the ton! We can have Kilotons and Megatons...wait, that sounds very familiar...
This is the biggest non-story every. They had to resort to gender-baiting to get anyone to give the slightest fuck, and then it's boring.
The real credit goes to an international team of scientists who are MEN
This Feminist worship has got to stop.
What, no comparisons to stacked handwritten notes any more?
And that's just the top of the iceberg of what's wrong with idiot journos coming up with even stupider comparisons.
What was the bitrate and god help if it is that joint stereo garbage!
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." -- Andrew S. Tanenbaum
https://preview.tinyurl.com/yy...
whistles...
Since TB drives are common now, 5000 TB would have been easier to understand for most people.
In other words, it's a FAKE image, an "artist's impression".
Why would a black hole be a disc shape? A black hole should be a sphere and would only be visible when it obscures light sources behind it. That's it. No magical 'corona' of gases and dust around it. This is pure bollocks, fake research, and of course, they get paid a shit ton of money for their fraud. How does this help humanity in any way?
”the equivalent of 5,000 years worth of MP3s”
How am I supposed to get a sense of scale from that? They didn’t even provide the bit rate...
#DeleteChrome
See a black hole, yeah right.
Let's get Slashdot back on track with stories about Global Warming and all that malarkey. We want a higher grade of bullshit.
Black hole my ass.
RIAA goons are going to sue for denial of monetizable piracy by all of that potential pirate storage being displaced by scientific data.
The universe lives because the black holes existence, otherwise the entropy had destroied it.
Storing the raw data for the image was a feat itself -- tiny portions of data spread across five petabytes stored on multiple hard drives
the development of the algorithm that imaged the black hole
each pointed at the black hole and gathering data at different times. The data scientists then pieced this information together and used an algorithm to fill in the blanks and generate a likely image of the black hole
Let's imagine a very simplistic scenario as starting point. We have a set of 2D points drawing a square (0,0), (1,0), (1,1), (0,1). The points represent matter (in whatever way: via mass, forces, behaviour of light, etc.) and the square center the black hole. You can convert that simplistic drawing into an as big as required one by accumulating more data points around the square. Let's assume that you have now 1 million points or 1 billion or 100 billions of billions, but not a single point in the central part, where the black hole is supposed to be.
Honestly, my knowledge about relativity, black holes and similar is pretty limited, so please correct me if I am wrong here or at any other point. In any case, please keep the discussion at a level where it is fully compatible with generally-applicable physics, maths and validatable statements. I am not particularly interested in the abstract theoretical, philosophical, similar aspects.
By assuming that the aforementioned ideas are right, I have various doubts:
1. How are they (not) getting data points? How can they find the place where a black hole exists? How do you measure matter (in the space) and absence of it? Or perhaps it is through force/gravity, interaction between bodies? Or the way in which light interact with objects? What is translated into the 0s and 1s, what makes something being a data point or part of the hollowed nothingness?
2. How is supposed to work this approach of using various devices located in different places? This seems a tremendously problematic, error-prone, difficult-to-coordinate/validate/fix methodology. Who and how is confirming the validity of each action/collection? How is it accounting for the fact that this black hole (or any other one, I guess) is extremely far away from us? So far away that there is a little chance to confirm/validate almost anything, that the actual applicability of virtually any assumption might be dubious. If your devices only find black holes in extremely far away places, wouldn't it make some sense to think that the absence of data might be associated with the limited capability of the devices? Or, in other words, how can anyone be sure that a device delivering a nonexistent/negative/erroneous measurement (a basic requisite to find a black hole, right?) is undoubtedly indicating the presence of something?
3. Why taking so long and collecting so much information when the black hole was already located? What is that algorithm exactly doing that couldn't have been easily done before? As shown in my simplistic example, once you locate the big deal here (the beyond-imaginable hollow where everything and nothing is possible), all the surroundings seem pretty irrelevant. Collecting 1 or 1M data points seems quite trivial, exactly the same than generating a picture from those data points. Even if you are representing interactions/forces/attractions because all that has to be already reflected in the collected information. Is perhaps that algorithm doing something else rather than just generating a picture associated with a set of descriptive enough data points? In that case, what is it doing exactly?
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
of a C130 loaded with Flashdrives flying at 700 mph. The latency is a bitch though.
**Life is too short to be serious**
> each pointed at the black hole and gathering data at different times.
*sigh* the while point and what took significant issues was that the observations had to be taken at *exactly* at the same time
"Stored On About Half a Ton of Hard Drives"
Thanks for this worthless factoid being pointlessly tacked onto the headline, my computer just slapped me with a lawsuit. She kept rambling on about toxic work environment, being fat-shamed (I mean, she does have 240TB), and that the last thing we need right now is to be chastised for a large Data Mass Index (DMI).
Man, I remember the days when that data was in a tight 4TB RAID-1 stripe. It eventually spread out far and wide across a RAID-10 array over the years. Careful of the data creep kids. At the rate we're clickbaiting titles these days, your medical insurance is gonna go up if you're carrying around more than 200TB, especially in a small form factor.
Here's the data compressed: .
Not valid unless given in LOCâ(TM)s
Could've been done with 5u of rack space utilizing Intel's new ruler format SSD's, IDK how much it would weight but I'm guessing no where near half a ton ...
14 TB per HDD... 80 HDD to half a PB.... times 10...800 HDD weighs 500 kg... A little over half a kilogram.... Sounds about right
Now imagine having to load each one! :D
There is a huge new building in Utah, with its own 65 megawatt electrical grid, that is ALL hard drives. You'll not get a tour of that though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The size/weight(?) of the data isn't the cool part honestly. Hell, Intel will be shipping a 1PB 1U flash system this year.
What's cools is the coordinated collection, aggregation and analysis. It's the stuff of my nerdy dreams.
How many elephants is that?
Your comment makes no sense. "Trumptards" would not give a fuck about curing cancer and would prefer oil over fusion.
You're missing his (angry) point anyway.
He may not have said it in the nicest way, but he definitely got a point there, from his limited POV.
So why do people here think it's appropriate to act like assholes *themselves* too, mod him "-1, Troll", and talk like you do?
Shouldn't you be agreeing that there are definitely more pressing concerns, but that because of $reasons, this is definitely not useless?
He's missing out, and standing there with his fly open, and you're calling him a moron and neither teach him nor tell him about his dick showing.
That is not nice. That is, in fact, exactly imitating what you just hated on and downmodded.
So go to your corner, be ashamed, and mod yourselves "-1, Troll" too.
"Kiloton" is a silly word.
It means "Kilo(kilo(kilogram))"
Just say gigagram. It sounds way cooler too.
OGG is just a container.
And Matroska is a better one.
How much is it in: stereo 4K 32-bit FP RGB indistinguishable-from-uncompressed-by-video-engineers VBR H.265 video + 6-channel 32-bit FP indistinguishable-from-uncompressed-by-audio-engineers Vorbis audio = Matroska?
Or should we bring in full field of view and light field and sound wave field recording capabilities?
Just wanted to point out that this is not the accomplishment that the media and scientific community are making it out to be. This is a rendering of what a black hole MIGHT look like. It is not a picture of a black hole.
Jeez, does nobod read anything but comments anymore?
It's not a disc!
It's just that because light is bent around it, it looks like a donut/disc from every angle!
That's also why it's looking brighter on one side!
No, it does not make sense ... to the human mind.
We are not born to comprehend the twisting of spacetime and light like that.
So gut feel is useless here.
Black holes sound like a Coldplay song? Sounds about right.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
That picture is the most underwhelming thing I've seen given the time and effort involved. I'm pretty sure the movie Interstellar used a correct model for their black hole. This looks like a blurry background image from an old video game.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I mentioned this in a late comment on the other post, and the hardware has been mentioned on the Reddit thread - including by the person who built the modules! - but the Mark 6 drive packs used for recording this data at various large, high-bandwidth radio observatories can handle 16 Gbps sustained records. (By way of comparison, an all-SSD RAID might get you about one-quarter that speed.)
It was explained to me by a guy who runs a radio telescope as each pack more or less being a JBOD, but with controllers smart enough to write each packet of data to whatever drive was ready to handle it, while keeping a journal on some other drive of where things had been written, so that the data could be reassembled later. The word "shotgun" figured into the explanation.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
Gigagram is the correct SI unit for this.
Wow, that's a lot of data. Did it take the whole internet's bandwidth for a day to send it to all the sites?
No. We used sneakernet.
What sort of tires did they use to get the latency down?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
are those Imperial holes or metric holes?
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
"The five petabytes of data took up such a massive amount of digital and physical space it couldn't be sent over the internet.'
Subcontract the job to the adult video industry.
Media like the New York Times are slathering at the thought of hijacking all this bandwidth to propagate advertizing and propaganda..Real news is for losers.
Katie Bouman, a computer scientist and assistant professor at the California Institute of Technology, led the development of the algorithm that imaged the black hole.
That depends on what you mean by "led." She only committed about 0.4% of the actual algorithm code (affecting 3675 lines), and many of those commits were for superficial things like the font color of the output. Other commits were to place other people's code into the project. The other 99.6% of the code was committed by men.
She did not lead in the sense that she did not do most of the work, or most of the programming. Perhaps she was appointed to supervise the people who actually developed the algorithm, and in that sense she "led" the development.
I don't care how many of those I personally authored."
Think about that ? It makes me very sad that this guy is so threatened by this situation he has to deny the value of his work.
Without knowing more about everyone on the team and who did what, etc
I read that and say it's inappropriate to assign anyone credit, and any attempt to is nothing but pushing a bias.
There is no such thing as Gravity, it's only a form of magnetism.
All matter is simply energy levels in a synced state. once the matter enters the "black hole" it's synced state gets altered back into a high compressed state resulting in X-Rays and Gamma Rays and some other trace frequencies.
In short, a black hole is a giant energy recycle machine.
Bowman=Chael. Mixed the names up.
Aww, is the poor incel insecure a woman got some attention? There, there...
And yet, you are so threatened by the idea that a women could be a talented scientist that you are projecting what YOU think by claiming its what he really thinks. Both of these young scientists are gifted contributors to the greater understanding of our universe who have BOTH stated they were mere members of a larger team. YOU however, are a coward hiding behind anonymity, terrified of anything that remotely impacts your false narrative of reality.
Andrew Chael wrote the majority of the algorithm. He is the person responsible for this achievement. The left wing media found a woman to prop up and has mislead the entire world. All of this is SJW crap on the left is profoundly absurd and wrong.
You are making a common mistake. The kilogram is the standard weight, but naming nomenclature is based on the gram:
Names and symbols for decimal multiples and submultiples of the unit of mass are formed by attaching prefix names to the unit name "gram," and prefix symbols to the unit symbol "g."
from https://www.nist.gov/pml/weigh...
We know that humanity is in danger when we start measuring scientific success in tons and kilograms... Donut or pretzel shaped, how about dropping by your neighbour to find out how s/he is doing ... :-\
The Black-hole concepts -misnomer-misleads Science.
Astronomers need reference frame Index to understand cosmology studies.
get out of the psychology of Black-holes and pull down gravity. The real Picture must emerge out of this
-black-hole flare-up. We are missing knowledge base in dimensions. Search origins -means open dialogue and Cosmological digest.
I'd like to take my rocket ship in to her black hole!