- Joined
- May 18, 1997
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- 54,458
Let's start with what is a Petabyte? I will give you a hint. I will give you a hint. It is not a wound inflicted by your neighbor's dog.
The petabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. The prefix peta indicates the fifth power of 1000 and means 1015 in the International System of Units SI, and therefore 1 petabyte is one quadrillion (short scale) bytes, or 1 billiard (long scale) bytes. The unit symbol for the petabyte is PB.
So....1 PB equals 1,000 Terabytes, or 1,000,000 Gigabytes. Wow. Now my 512GB SSD seems very very small. I now have petabyte envy. Anyway, the post of this news post is to report that the CERN data center now houses over 200PB of data that it has collected, and it only keeps the "interesting" stuff...ON TAPE! 200PB is 2e+8GB, if you were wondering.
On 29 June 2017, the CERN DC passed the milestone of 200 petabytes of data permanently archived in its tape libraries. Where do these data come from? Particles collide in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) detectors approximately 1 billion times per second, generating about one petabyte of collision data per second. However, such quantities of data are impossible for current computing systems to record and they are hence filtered by the experiments, keeping only the most "interesting" ones.
Of course the real question is how long will it take to download it all if they change cloud TOS and need the data back?
The petabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. The prefix peta indicates the fifth power of 1000 and means 1015 in the International System of Units SI, and therefore 1 petabyte is one quadrillion (short scale) bytes, or 1 billiard (long scale) bytes. The unit symbol for the petabyte is PB.
So....1 PB equals 1,000 Terabytes, or 1,000,000 Gigabytes. Wow. Now my 512GB SSD seems very very small. I now have petabyte envy. Anyway, the post of this news post is to report that the CERN data center now houses over 200PB of data that it has collected, and it only keeps the "interesting" stuff...ON TAPE! 200PB is 2e+8GB, if you were wondering.
On 29 June 2017, the CERN DC passed the milestone of 200 petabytes of data permanently archived in its tape libraries. Where do these data come from? Particles collide in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) detectors approximately 1 billion times per second, generating about one petabyte of collision data per second. However, such quantities of data are impossible for current computing systems to record and they are hence filtered by the experiments, keeping only the most "interesting" ones.
Of course the real question is how long will it take to download it all if they change cloud TOS and need the data back?