The LHC, the world's most powerful particle collider, is expected to produce 100-petabyte data sets. A harbinger of the scientific applications to come is the TerraServer , a geographical database developed by a team headed by James Gray at Microsoft Research . Approximately 50 percent of the U.S. has been digitized so far, and the continental U.S. is expected to be completed by the end of 2001. Each day, the TerraServer logs 5 to 8 million web hits and 5 to 6 million database stored procedure executions, and 50 gigabytes of image data are downloaded. The system is fast and manageable even with 28.8k modems.
Users can click on locations on a map or enter the place they wish to view.
This charge coupled device array, containing 120 million pixels, will capture astronomical data for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The CCDs in each row have filters to capture different colors of incoming light. The project will digitally map about half of the Northern sky in five spectral bands from ultraviolet to the near infrared. When it is completed next year, SDSS is expected to have detected over 200 million objects, mostly galaxies, and accumulated more than 40 terabytes of data. The resulting information is then fed into a database that divides the sky into ever smaller triangles.