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Science

RHIC Computing Facility Crosses the 1 PB Mark 51

Posted by michael from the infoglut dept.
Martin writes "Brookhaven National Lab's RHIC Computing Facility (RCF) announced yesterday that the amount of data from the physics experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) crossed the 1 PetaByte mark. A mail that was sent around to the RCF users contained a GUI screen shot (which is removed from the mail archive) that showed the number of MegaBytes transferred as 1,000,400,143. The RCF web pages have some pictures of the tape silos that hold the data. RHIC and the experiments have been discussed on ./ a few times, look here, here, and here."
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RHIC Computing Facility Crosses the 1 PB Mark More

RHIC Computing Facility Crosses the 1 PB Mark

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  • Well, if they have more than a PB, then they should easily handling a slashdotting!

  • Just how big is a petabyte... (Score:4, Informative)

    by MissMarvel ( 723385 ) * on Thursday January 29, 2004 @01:39PM (#8125087) Journal
    Thanks to the definitions page [techtarget.com]:

    A petabyte is a measure of memory or storage capacity and is 2 to the 50th power bytes or, in decimal, approximately a thousand terabytes.

    A terabyte is a measure of computer storage capacity and is 2 to the 40th power or approximately a thousand billion bytes (that is, a thousand gigabytes).

    A gigabyte is a measure of computer data storage capacity and is "roughly" a billion bytes. A gigabyte is two to the 30th power, or 1,073,741,824 in decimal notation.

    What's bigger?

    An exabyte (EB) is a large unit of computer data storage, two to the sixtieth power bytes. The prefix exa means one billion billion, or one quintillion, which is a decimal term. Two to the sixtieth power is actually 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 bytes in decimal, or somewhat over a quintillion (or ten to the eighteenth power) bytes. It is common to say that an exabyte is approximately one quintillion bytes. In decimal terms, an exabyte is a billion gigabytes.

    • Re:Just how big is a petabyte... (Score:4, Informative)

      by zelphior ( 668354 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @01:51PM (#8125271) Homepage Journal
      Actually, data storage isn't measured in base 2. A megabyte is 1,000,000 bytes. The prefix mega indicating 10^6. A gigabyte is 10^9 bytes. A Terabyte is 10^12 bytes. A petabyte is 10^15, or one million billion bytes.

      • Re:Just how big is a petabyte... (Score:5, Informative)

        by KnightStalker ( 1929 ) <map_sort_map@yahoo.com> on Thursday January 29, 2004 @02:46PM (#8125956) Homepage
        It's probably worth mentioning that of course this is a redefinition of the traditional meanings and will probably irritate the same people who object to the phrase "Native American". But as in that case the traditional usage is entirely wrong. New [wikipedia.org] standards [nist.gov] are slowly being adopted [slashdot.org]. Although I rarely use them myself, I think using "mebi" etc. are preferable to coopting the SI prefixes. (Knuth doesn't like them [njit.edu]).
      • "Actually, data storage isn't measured in base 2" ... anymore so marketing can make you think you're getting a bigger hard drive than you really are.
        • But it has to do with more than marketing. That's just a fortunate coincidence which they are more than happy to make use of. Base 2 measurements are used for RAM because most RAM produced holds a power of 2 number of bytes. This is not true for many other storage devices, including hard disks.

          Personally, I think that defining a kilobyte as 1024 bytes is only useful very little of the time. In general it is less convenient than displaying units in terms of the number system that we have been taught to use
      • That'd be the definitions of someone who sells HDs for them to look bigger. To reach a decent Petabyte I think it requires 1 073 741 824 Megabytes (2^30), not the 1 007 ... ... as pointed out in the article or 10^9 as in the parent. (all in MB)

        I also think people should remember that 10^6 bytes is just close to a megabyte. No need to alter the definitions. Most of the times, you just need approximations anyway. When you need the exact amount of bytes (like, when you want to say: I passed a PB!) you do the
      • It depends on who is doing the measuring. Companies who make storage media often use the system you describe, while software actually performing the reading and writing most often use 2^10 = kilobyte, 2^20 = megabyte, etc. since it reflects what is (more or less) actually happening on the media.

    • Re:Just how big is a petabyte... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by A55M0NKEY ( 554964 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @02:15PM (#8125579) Homepage Journal
      Avogadro's number is approx 600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms per mol. If you were to store an an exabyte of data in one mol of material then each byte would have a budget of about 600,000 atoms. That may be doable...

      • Re:Just how big is a petabyte... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Idarubicin ( 579475 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @05:19PM (#8127804) Journal
        Avogadro's number is approx 600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms per mol. If you were to store an an exabyte of data in one mol of material then each byte would have a budget of about 600,000 atoms. That may be doable...

        It's eminently doable. That's 75,000 particles (atoms or molecules, depending on the species used) per bit--a huge number, still.

        The problem comes in storage and readout. If I have to flip bits manually using a scanning electron microscope, that's no good.

        On the other hand, let's assume that the work can be done optically, using a scanning laser. Take something the size of a vitamin E molecule; it absorbs visible light readily. Lying flat on a substrate, it would have a surface area (*very* roughly) of about 75 square angstroms. 75,000 of those would cover an area of about five million square angstroms. If arrayed over a square, that's about 240 nanometers on a side, or the diffraction limited spot size of a 480 nm wavelength laser.

        Yep, it could be done. A monomolecular layer on a flat substrate; about half a kilogram of molecule. Perfect--a petabyte for your laptop! But--that would cover a total square area of six or so square kilometers...somewhat awkward to scan with a single laser, and a bit clumsy to carry.

        • The media of a modern hard disk is normally a thin layer of iron oxide over an aluminum substrate. I don't know how much iron oxide is typically used in hard disks (any engineers know?), but 1 mol of Fe2O3 would be 160g (~5.6 oz).

          I imagine that the thin coating of iron oxide on the platter of a hard drive actually represents orders of magnitude less material than 5.6 oz.

          I think we may have already acheived and surpassed this kind of information density. Does anybody know how much mass is represented by the

          • I think we may have already acheived and surpassed this kind of information density. Does anybody know how much mass is represented by the media layer on a hard drive?

            Off the top of my head, I don't know the mass of the media layer on a hard drive, but it's easy enough to find the areal density of the data.

            IBM's 'pixie dust' [ibm.com] (AFC) technology promises densities of up to about 100 billion bits per square inch. That's (roughly) 1000 square angstroms per bit. In other words, about an order of magnitude mo

            • When you start getting to equipment like this, though, areal density just doesn't cut it anymore - you're probably stacking hundreds (if not thousands) of "platters" for this.

              Bits per cubic centimeter is a perfectly good measurement for things like this (it works for current HDs as well, but even a 300GB HD right now only has a density of 2.07 * 10^10 b/cc [heh, "only"]).

              BTW, I was hoping this was referring to IBM's current R&D project that was in SciAm around the beginning of last year (nanodrives) -
    • Youre right. They havent crossed the petabyte yet. I cant wait till Maxtor comes out with Petabyte IDE disks, my video collection will reside on it. I'm sure theyll come out with games that will take 25% of THAT drive.

      Next is the Exabyte. Whats after that?

      I'm also curious why they use tapes and not just rows and rows of cheap IDE disks. Each IDE carrying 250GB at $250 will cost em $1 million plus taxes, shipping, backplane etc, and of course one full-time guy to constantly replace the failed disks with ne
      • one full-time guy to constantly replace the failed disks with new ones

        And this is why they don't. Tape is vastly more reliable than HDs are, particularly when you're talking about this much data. As long as you don't need realtime (or even near realtime) access to the data then tape is the better choice. Even with that much data a robotic tape server can serve you the data from any one tape with only a few seconds of access time plus however long it takes to spool the tape. Probably under 5 minutes for an

      • Re:Just how big is a petabyte... (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        After the exabyte would be the zettabyte (10^21) then the yottabyte (10^24). As far as I know we have not defined any prefixes above yotta since there are very few things that it would be usefull for.
  • and we have more of those silo's then they do :)

  • Weeee (Score:5, Funny)

    by NanoGator ( 522640 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @01:55PM (#8125337) Homepage Journal
    "RHIC Computing Facility Crosses the 1 PB Mark"

    Tomorrow's story:

    "RHIC Computing Facility Slashdotted, Crosses the 2 PB Mark." Some will complain of dupes, others will say RTFA.

  • The obvious: (Score:3, Funny)

    by jtosburn ( 63943 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @01:56PM (#8125351)
    showed the number of MegaBytes transferred as 1,000,400,143

    That's a lot of copies of MyDoom!!!!!!

    With apologies....I'll STFU now.

  • Interresting take from my co-worker (Score:4, Funny)

    by Captain Rotundo ( 165816 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @02:02PM (#8125424) Homepage
    We are but a few miles from BNL, so I thought I'd mention this interresting fact to my co-workers, one of them said "I thought a 'peda-bite' had something to do with Michael Jackson" :)

  • Time to FIGHT! (Score:3, Funny)

    by yardbird ( 165009 ) * on Thursday January 29, 2004 @02:12PM (#8125532) Homepage
    We all must FIGHT Wal-mart and the other proponents of RHIC! This 1 PB milestone is yet another erosion of our privacy and will not.. what? Oh, never mind.
    • Is that the number of bytes that can be processed (bitten off, so to speak) while one eats a PBJ? (Which, by the way, in my 12-year-old son's case, is darn near one second!)

      cragen

  • "Mail" is a mass noun (Score:2, Informative)

    by Pingster ( 14864 )
    Some nouns can be counted, like "two sticks". Others cannot, like "rice".

    "A mail was sent around" is just as grammatically incorrect as "She ate a rice" or "That boy has a courage". The poster should have written "Mail was sent around" or "A message was sent around".

  • Image link (Score:2, Informative)

    by infernow ( 529374 )
    Here's a direct link [bnl.gov] to the image, if you're feeling lazy.
  • The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider??
    It's nothing compared to the Great Hyperlobic Omni-Cognate Neutron Wrangler of Ciceronicus Twelve.
  • But I really think it's justified:

    the experiments have been discussed on ./ a few times

    Maybe we're supposed to read it backwards to reveal a secret message, like "Taco is Dead" or something?
  • The screenshot attached to the email message is available here [bnl.gov].
  • Mmmmm, rack-mounted.

  • Compression (Score:2, Funny)

    by DarkHand ( 608301 )
    Someone needs to introduce them to a little company called PKWare...
  • No one needs that many MP3's and that much porn!

  • Big Deal (Score:3, Funny)

    by Zork the Almighty ( 599344 ) on Friday January 30, 2004 @12:41AM (#8131737) Journal
    That's still only half the porn on the internet.
  • What the f*ck are these old B/W TV screens standing on their side in the middle of the table? Do they have some "legacy" apps running on an ENIAC?

  • Wow... (Score:2)

    by voss ( 52565 )
    http://www.rhic.bnl.gov/RCF/GuidedTour/HPSS/

    If you look at the third picture...isnt that an orgasmatron? ;)

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