The Large Hadron Collider is more than just the world’s coolest/most dangerous science experiment — it’s also producing a frankly ridiculous amount of data. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to Geneva, but that’s just peanuts to the LHC.
Stefan Gillard is chief commercial officer for Steam Engine, an Australian high performance computing company which is one of the outfits helping crunch all the numbers spewed out by the LHC. And the numbers associated with the process that Gillard quoted at an Intel press lunch yesterday are worth a quick eye-goggle:
They turn the LHC on for a 12-second burst, and then it takes them four weeks to drop it to to zero. That 12 seconds produces two petabytes of data, which is chunked up into ten-terabyte blocks which each generate five years’ worth of research data.
In case you were wondering: two petabytes is the equivalent of about 700 million MP3 downloads. Try throwing that at iTunes and see what happens.
Stew
Thursday, April 7, 2011 at 3:19 PMLove the HHGTTG reference
Matt Reid
Thursday, April 7, 2011 at 4:36 PM+1
Matthew Smith
Thursday, April 7, 2011 at 3:41 PMBucketloads, is that an SI unit?
Zac
Thursday, April 7, 2011 at 4:56 PMIt’s right below Craploads
Ben
Thursday, April 7, 2011 at 6:01 PMHow many bucketloads in a shedload?
Alex
Thursday, April 7, 2011 at 3:42 PMI really envy those at the forefront of scientific endeavours. They’ll look back on their lives and think about how they progressed the human race, I’ll look back on mine and think about all the lolcats I saw and CS headshots I did :S
matt
Thursday, April 7, 2011 at 11:03 PMn00bs… someones gotta pwn them.
David Gray
Thursday, April 7, 2011 at 4:28 PMI lol’d at Alex and Matthew. And yes, bucketloads is a SI unit. Like “Shitloads” or “fucktons”
I throw 7 MP3s at iTunes and it chokes. How can we expect it to handle anything more?
I wonder how well this information GZips up?
The Wah
Thursday, April 7, 2011 at 6:33 PMPeople regularly confuse one “Fuckton” with a “Metric Fuckton”. It’s an easy error to make
Atomsk
Thursday, April 7, 2011 at 6:49 PMWhats the imperial conversion of a metric fuckton?
Tomas Medina
Thursday, April 7, 2011 at 7:46 PM2.2 imperial to the metric.
The Joker
Thursday, April 7, 2011 at 7:48 PMSince 181 is the metric conversion for 69, then the conversion factor would be 1 metric fuckton = 0.381215 imperial fucktons.
Andrew
Thursday, April 7, 2011 at 4:30 PMI guess the good news is that they fired it up and it didn’t create a black hole, worm hole, or any other type of hole that’s not meant to be there.
I hope one of these scientists writes a book called “Tearing the universe a new one”
The Joker
Thursday, April 7, 2011 at 7:43 PMPlenty of data to fill the hole with in any case.
Carl Bowers
Thursday, April 7, 2011 at 10:35 PMI do believe the term for anyone still measuring anything in the imperial system is known as a Fuckwit!