Petabyte: Difference between revisions

Multiple-byte units
Decimal Value Metric 1000 kB kilobyte 10002 MB megabyte 10003 GB gigabyte 10004 TB terabyte 10005 PB petabyte 10006 EB exabyte 10007 ZB zettabyte 10008 YB yottabyte 10009 RB ronnabyte 100010 QB quettabyte	Binary Value IEC Memory 1024 KiB kibibyte KB kilobyte 10242 MiB mebibyte MB megabyte 10243 GiB gibibyte GB gigabyte 10244 TiB tebibyte TB terabyte 10245 PiB pebibyte – 10246 EiB exbibyte – 10247 ZiB zebibyte – 10248 YiB yobibyte – 10249 – – 102410 – –
Orders of magnitude of data

A petabyte (derived from the SI prefix peta- ) is a unit of information or computer storage equal to one quadrillion bytes. It is commonly abbreviated PB.

Because of irregularities in using the binary prefix in the definition and usage of the kilobyte, the exact number in common practice could be either one of the following:

• 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes — 1000⁵, or 10¹⁵.
• 1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes — 1024⁵, or 2⁵⁰. This capacity may be expressed unambiguously as a pebibyte.

Petabytes in use

The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) in the USA has a 1 petabyte hard disk store and a 6 petabyte robotic tape store, both attached to the National Science Foundation's TeraGrid network. (Source: Electronics Weekly, December 11, 2002)

The Internet Archive Wayback Machine contains almost 2 petabytes of data and is currently growing at a rate of 20 terabytes per month. (Source: Internet Archive FAQ, as of May 2006)

The first commercially available Petabyte Storage Array was launched by the EMC Corporation in January 2006, with an approximate cost of USD 4 million. [1]

NOB Cross media facilities in the Netherlands employs a 1.5 petabyte storage network for the storage of all old and new public television and radio content in digital format. Within the next year, most Dutch public television content will be pulled directly out of this database during broadcast.

Reportedly, Google in 2003 had between 2 and 5 petabytes of storage.

As of October 15 2005, all the files being shared on Kazaa totaled around 54 petabytes.

In the science-fiction TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation, the android Data was built with an ultimate storage capacity of 800 quadrillion bits, or approximately 88.8 petabytes (Google Calculator Link). Interestingly enough, in order to accurately remember the visual experiences alone of an approximately 40 year old human in UHDV, one would require 2.5 exabytes, far greater than the 88.8 petabyte storage cited.

As of January 2006, the http://www.climateprediction.net distributed computing experiment which aims to run thousands of cycles of modelled climate change to predict future patterns is producing 2-3 petabytes of data. This project is conducted via the computing power of thousands of home users whose computers crunch numbers in their spare, 'idle' time.

According to IBM, the Managed Storage Services offering in IBM Global Services manages more than two petabytes for IBM customers around the world.

Indiana University announced on April 5 2006 that it is acquiring the nation's fastest university-owned supercomputer and largest disk-based research storage facility. This new supercomputer will be connected to more than 1 petabyte of high speed disk storage. It will be by far the largest of its type of university-owned storage in the United States.

CERN has, with its newly installed LHC, a datastream with 1 petabyte/s during the collision of small parts. GridKa [2] (The European Tier1 in Karlsruhe/Germany) plans to extend its disk capacity to 4.2 petabytes for the LHC datastream.

See also

• pebibyte
• petabit
• binary prefix
• orders of magnitude (data)

External links

• CacheLogic Survey: P2P Accounts for 10 Petabytes of Data
• Fancy a Million-Gigabtye Hard Drive?