Tracking Near-Earth Meteors With a 1.1 Petabyte Database 72
Lucas123 writes "The latest and most ambitious attempt to detect 'near-Earth objects' (NEOs) is the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System, or Pan-STARRS. When it's fully operational several years from now, it will have four telescopes, each with a 1.4-gigapixel camera. The system is expected to be able to track virtually all NEOs larger than 300 meters in diameter as well as many smaller ones. Rather than turning to an expensive supercomputer equipped with hundreds or thousands of processors, Pan-STARRS will use a cluster of 50 PC servers connected to 1.1 petabytes of disk storage via fast Infiniband networking gear."
Hang on (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:A 50 PC cluster that processes 1.1Pb of data? (Score:4, Interesting)
So what is worth tracking that is 1.1Pb of data? Are there really that many NEO that are to be concerned about? 1.1Pb is a LOT of data to manage, even with a cluster of "50 PC's". Will this data be used for modeling or just for tracking or a combination of both? I'm interested in the technical explanation for needing that large of storage.
Re:Near-Earth Meteors ? (Score:4, Interesting)
Larger than a meteoroid, the object is an asteroid; smaller than that, it is interplanetary dust.
And since this is an article dealing with NEOs...
The NEO definition includes larger objects, up to 50 m in diameter, to this category.