IBM builds biggest-ever disk for secret customer

Source

120 PB monster 'for simulation'. Nuke labs?

Flash may be one cutting edge of storage action, but big data is causing developments at the other side of the storage pond, with IBM developing a 120 petabyte 200,000-disk array.

The mighty drive is being developed for a secret supercomputer-using customer "for detailed simulations of real-world phenomena" according to MIT's Technology Review, and takes current large-array technology trends a step or two further.

IBM Almaden storage systems research director Bruce Hillsberg says that 200,000 SAS disk drives are involved, rather than SATA ones, because performance is a concern. A back-of-an-envelope calculation suggests 600GB drives are being used and Seagate 2.5-inch Savvios come to mind.

120 PB? Holy crap thats a boat load of storage. There could be back ups for our genetic codes on there so that we have back-ups of people.

Anyways, all joking aside, who would need this much space? Are we talking about a medical institute running tests? CERN? Or the good old US military?

Whoever needs it is obviously concerned about saving all their information. Wikileaks should get ahold of government hard drives like this. Obviously the thing that attracted me to the story was 'secret' so I was wondering what others opinions are of this.

Any thoughts?

Pred...

Anyways, all joking aside, who would need this much space? Are we talking about a medical institute running tests? CERN? Or the good old US military?

My cousin has gotten completely out of hand with all his porn archiving... Yet, I somehow think it may be a defense contracter needing the space. There are only so many Jenna Jameson videos out there....

My bet is on NSA or some other large alphabet entity.

Originally posted by predator0187

Anyways, all joking aside, who would need this much space? Are we talking about a medical institute running tests? CERN? Or the good old US military?

Whoever needs it is obviously concerned about saving all their information. Wikileaks should get ahold of government hard drives like this.

Obviously the thing that attracted me to the story was 'secret' so I was wondering what others opinions are of this.

Any thoughts?

Pred...

First thing that came to mind is all the spyware that is loaded on the newer generation of phones. Maybe the NSA is keeping record of everyone's snatched phone intel.

it could be for a chinese customer

Originally posted by elpistolero1
it could be for a chinese customer

I doubt it, I don't see them "buying foreign".

Don't we have a thread about intelligence simulations integrating all data on all citizens scooped up by echelon and the Net skimming programs? WhereEvery living person is represented by a set a of conditions or assumptions.. they ad an element like suddenly implementing "martial law" and push"go":
"They" watch what happens to the simulation; add that first 10 runs back into the original data set and run it again refining it each time; sooner or later you produce a finer detailed more accurate "guesstimate"(representation) of the real outcome and hence: who your problem chldren will turnout to be?

Or am I just being paranoid?...
I'msorry thecomputing resources implied in this project scares the crap outta' me.( national I.D here we come!)

Wow that's huge. But then again huge is so relative anymore. My bet is something medically related because that's where a lot of their focus has been in recent years, at least what gets disclosed. But then again, with them, who knows.

I also bet NSA they have the largest database known to man after all

quantum teleportation could require tremendous amounts of data storage to store the quantum state of every atom in an object or body...

WETA storage for Avatar 2 & 3.

They are talking abour using SAS drives because they want best performance. Interesting. So this is more than just a storage system, it is going to be used for high speed read write access.

Could a mainframe have enough bandwidth to disk to be able to use this as cache? That would enable some phenominal realtime manipulation of data. Nothing you couldn't model with that!

Of course, you need to know a little about what this is going to be plugged into before you can really speculate with any accuracy.

Won't be CERN or any publicly funded project - they would not want to keep it a secret - they would want to boast about their fabulous new technology - it has to be military.

What sort of application needs near instant access to PB's of data?

S&F OP - good find.

I think that would be close to 7 million movies worth of storage.

If you managed 2 porns a night it would take you well over 9500 years to watch them all

reply to post by Shamatt


yeah, agree,

+ i was thinking about the weather,
and how complicated that would be to "data - set"...

imho

Originally posted by elpistolero1
it could be for a chinese customer

My thoughts exactly. Which is also why they probably don't want to reveal who the customer is. IBM has been doing a lot of work for China lately. It was IBM, or rather a guy that worked for IBM that made the first computerized brain for China just a few weeks ago.

In the future, watch China not only have the worlds largest standing army, but the first mass produced robot army.

IBM proved in WWII they have no allegiance to a country. Besides, countries, or countries vs countries is for the masses to believe in. A big fantasy land with fantasy borders. The real players on the globe know gold and currency sees no flags, race, or borders. Business is business regardless.

no sources, but it is for military purpose. it a master drive for drones to fly there self all over the world and watch every one and every thing that goes on. its also to control the robotic army they have created that will enforce law on any population if needed. robots have no feelings so will not care about any thing or any one and will do what they are told to do. unless they have a form of artificial intelligence. witch is another thing its for, artificial intelligence for said robots and drones. when ww3 comes around we will have armys of robots and drones that will think for there self and reply to real time situations on the war front. so we might be able to have one up on the world and hopefully keep it that way

So.. this is just an array of many disks linked together.. I am NOT impressed. Your title is misleading - this is Not " the biggest disk ever created" it is the biggest hard drive array ever created.

Heck, show me a 3 terabyte hard drive for under a hundred bucks and then i'll be impressed..throw in a 100 gig dvd and a 100 gig flash drive to help back that sucker up and I'll be impressed.. an array of many hard drives.. big fat hairy deal.

how much storage would a computer need for a person? times that by close to 7 billion.., could this be the beast? just saying...

reply to post by iforget


Averaging 5 gigabyte a dvd it would be closer to 25.165.824 dvds (1 petabyte is 1024 terabyte is 1024 gigabyte)



Someone is trying to download the internet.

On a more serious note, I have had years where I had data traffic from and to Usenet that went way over 2 terabytes.

So I hope this is for the Internet Service Providers so they can collect their data cheaper, but, it my gut feeling says it has to do with the IBM Human Brain Chip

120 Petabytes is close to what we would need to transfer.

Originally posted by bg_socalif
My bet is on NSA or some other large alphabet entity.

This reminds me of this article about the NSA building a $896.5 Million Supercomputing Center

www.informationweek.com...