All Hubble Data Ever Collected on Your Laptop?
Well, not ON your laptop but attached to your laptop if Google has its way. Wired News writes about Google’s next-gen of sneakernet. I’ve used sneakernet - have you? That’s running in your sneakers from one computer to another with a disk of data to be transferred.
This project is affectionately called FedExNet by those associated with this gargantuan project. Noel Gorelick, a member of the research faculty in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University gave the project its name. With Google’s assistance he can copy the astronomical data in about 24 hours as opposed to the 30 days that it would take now.
This is part of what Wired News has to say:
Chris DiBona, the open-source program manager at Google, just returned late last week from Washington, D.C., where he met with Hubble researchers at the Space Telescope Science Institute to set the stage for what will be the largest data transfer for the project ever: The near totality of all the astronomical data and images that Hubble has ever collected — about 120 terabytes.
How much is 120 terabytes? It’s about 123,000 IPod shuffles - according to Wired, about 30 million songs! Fascinating information overload.
Here’s more:
And this raises the question of what Google intends to do with such a large amount of data, beyond just lending a helping hand. While the company remains cagey about its future plans, it’s conceivable that it may be working on a more science-oriented search engine, along the lines of Google Scholar.
Being a physics-type geek, I can’t wait to see what Google has in store.
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