IBM Building 120PB Cluster Out of 200,000 Hard Disks 290
MrSeb writes "Smashing all known records by some margin, IBM Research Almaden, California, has developed hardware and software technologies that will allow it to strap together 200,000 hard drives to create a single storage cluster of 120 petabytes — 120 million gigabytes. The data repository, which currently has no name, is being developed for an unnamed customer, but with a capacity of 120PB, it's most likely use will be a storage device for a governmental (or Facebook) supercomputer. With IBM's GPFS (General Parallel File System), over 30,000 files can be created per second — and with massive parallelism, and no doubt thanks to the 200,000 individual drives in the array, single files can be read or written at several terabytes per second."
Re:Depressing (Score:5, Insightful)
Facebook and presumably a spy agency?
You're repeating yourself.
Re:Not the government. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is generally something I have a hard time convincing people of. I've worked for spooky organizations. Not at the highest levels or on the most secret projects, but in the general vicinity. The government is not monitoring you. Not because they lack the legal capability (though they do, and that is mostly, but not always, respected), but because they lack the technical ability. There are only so many analysts, only so much computer time, only so much storage. Except in cases of explicit corruption or misuse of resource, those analysts, that computer time, and that storage is not being wasted on monitoring Joe and Jane average.
I'm not going to say that there aren't abuses by the people who have access to some of this stuff; they are human and weak like the rest of us and are often tempted to take advantage of their situation I'm sure. In general however, unless you've done something that got a warrant issued for your information, the government doesn't care. They just don't have the resources to be big brother, even if they want to be.