Byte Size

To make a long story short, I’ve never scaled a mountain.  But that’s not to say I won’t scale Everest in the near future.  In fact, I think I’m already underway – I think we’re ALL underway.  Let me explain.

Earlier this week, The New York Times ran an article on the ever-growing piles of computerized information filling our nation’s universities and other research institutions.  Entitled “Training to Climb an Everest of Digital Data,”  the piece pinpointed how researchers and students – that’s right, people like you and me – are bound for an uphill climb into the world of megas, teras and gigas. 

With massive amounts of information at our fingertips, and even more becoming available by the millisecond – see faster PCs, bigger hard drives and sharper telescopes as facilitators – it’ll eventually be up to current students to figure out how to manage all this “superdata.”  Those of us now slaving away at academics will one day fill the posts of scientists and professors whose livelihood depends on information analysis and interpretation. 

Not to scare anyone into living in your parents’ basement until you’re 50, but here’s a quick snapshot at what’s out there and what’s to come.  Regular Joe Schmo consumers – again, like you and me – buy external hard drvies for home use.  Regardless of what you store on them – I know college is college – there’s valuable information out there that can’t all be stored in the confines of a desktop computer.   Some of these devices can hold up to a terabyte of information, which roughly equates to 1,000 copies of the Encyclopedia Brittanica.  No biggie.  After all, today’s computer scientists deal with data sets thousands of times larger than this.

Let’s move on.  The Times mentioned how future researchers will need to think in terms of Internet scale.  Facebook, with its pantheons of revealing and potentially awkward photos, uses more than 1 petabyte of storage space for its users’ 40 billion pictures.  Again, no biggie.  To put things in perspective, 1 petabyte is about 1,000 times as large as a terabyte and can store a mere 500 billion pages of text.  And you think your biology readings are tough!

If you’re really up for a challenge, though, try figuring out how much information comprises an exabyte.  What about a zettabyte? Want to throw in all your cash for a yottabyte? (If you’re truly interested, a yottabyte constitutes 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes, but not nearly that much computerized data exists in the world today).

What we have to ask ourselves – and keep asking ourselves as data keeps expanding – is how we’re going to put all of this information to good use.  For the sake of some optimism in this jumbled world of database madness, know that evolving technologies will all but make access to this information that much easier.  I can only hope that the world’s information is put to good use.  How? I’m not sure anyone knows.

You want numbers? You got 'em!