The Library of Congress unveiled its redesigned Web site this month. Pages will feature new layouts and more efficient navigational paths. At the forefront of the new Web site is the Get It Online section, which includes links to the Library’s digital collections. These pages include the award-winning American Memory; THOMAS (legislative information); a presentation of the Library’s major exhibitions and Americaslibrary.gov, a site created especially for kids and families. The LOC puts about 29 terabytes on-line. Archive.org has 100 Terabytes on-line and is growing exponentially.
The world produces about 1.5 billion gigabytes of information per year (1.5 Exobytes), or 250 megabytes for every man, woman, and child on earth, according to U/C Berkeley research (NPR Report). This information consists of e-mails, phone calls, radio and television broadcasts, Websites, office documents, newspapers, etc. 93% is stored in digital form with hard drives in PCs accounting for 55% of total storage shipped each year. Printed documents of all kinds comprise only .003% of the total. All information ever produced since mankind began painting pictures in caves is 18 Exobytes. Twelve percent of the total was produced in the year 2000.
Asia-Pacific will account for 20 percent of e-commerce sales and more than a quarter of the world’s Internet users by 2004, according to the US Commerce Department.
The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory ordered a $24.5 million HP Linux-based supercomputer consisting of 1,400 Intel Itaniums will be set up within the Molecular Sciences Computing Facility. The computer will have 1.8 terabytes of memory and 170 terabytes of disk space. Applications of neural nets at EMSL include national security, environmental research and criminology.
Google’s server farm uses more than 10,000 computers. The ASTROVIRTEL project is mining a 7 Terabyte archive of space data from NASA, ESA, and others for all things astronomical. The database at the Stanford Linear Accelerator has reached the 500 terabyte mark, roughly equivalent to a billion books. A $5000 terabyte file server may make huge data libraries and data mining affordable.
Digital Nervous Systems may soon search Terabyte data bases. IBM Clusters may adopt IBM’s Ice Cube project, a prototype for a vast data-storage system built Lego-style with storage-array bricks. Each brick consists of twelve 2.5-inch hard drives, managed by three disk controllers tied to a microprocessor and a standard eight-port Ethernet switch. Future versions would likely use lower-latency, higher-throughput Infiniband switches.
Grid Computing shares the work. The TeraGrid is unique because it will link together various computing clusters at different locations. Globus is providing open-source protocols that will determine how the grids will communicate with each other. These open-source protocols will create a “plug-n-play” type effect where more machines could easily be added to the network.
The largest section of the TeraGrid will be hosted at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. There will also be portions of the TeraGrid at the University of California San Diego, Argonne National Laboratory, and the California Institute of Technology.
The Joint Conference on Digital Libraries will be held in Portland, Oregon, July 14-18, 2002.
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