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Gigabytes, Terabytes

The Trouble with Astronomy and Computer Storage



You need not be a tech-head to understand the problems being faced by the modern astronomers and scientists. Hard drive space is literally something we can all understand. You might not understand the mechanics, but you know that if you need 20GB and only have 18, then there is a problem.

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To fill you in a bit further, here's a bit of a nerd's view on how it's all going down. Many computers these days are sold with maybe 160GB of hard drive space. If you're a nerd like me, you're already running out of space on your combined 500 or 750GB hard drives. Soon, with the terabyte hard drive almost upon us, that's not going to be enough. It's the way storage works. The more you need, the less you can get your hands on. So just spare a thought for those scientists and astronomers out there, who have to deal with this problem; but on a much larger scale. Consider that, within the next decade, astronomers are expecting to be processing 100,000 terabyte's every hour at the Square Kilometer Array telescope. That's 10 million gigabytes. And please don't ask how long it took to do the math on all of that. DNA sequencing is getting cheaper too, and at 50GB for each sequence, with scientists possibly mining hundreds of thousands of genome databases, you can go do the math for yourself! So CSIRO - Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization--are starting a new research program, entitled �Terabyte Science', which hopes to help science deal with the mass amount of data that will soon be commonplace. "CSIRO recognizes that, for its science to be internationally competitive, the organization needs to be able to analyze large volumes of complex, even intermittently available, data from a broad range of scientific fields," says program leader, Dr John Taylor, from CSIRO Mathematical and Information Sciences. "This will need major developments in computer infrastructure and computational tools. It involves IT people, mathematicians and statisticians, image technologists, and other specialists from across CSIRO all working together in a very focused way," he says. So though you may have to delete the occasional folder every now and again to make room for that video or PowerPoint presentation, when you complain, spare a thought for the scientists. A PowerPoint problem would be the least of their troubles. Joshua Hill, a Geek’s-Geek from Melbourne, Australia, Josh is an aspiring author with dreams of publishing his epic fantasy, currently in the works, sometime in the next 5 years. A techie, nerd, sci-fi nut and bookworm.


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Guest Column Joshua Hill -- Bio and Archives

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