Getting Students To Think At Internet Scale 98
Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that researchers and workers in fields as diverse as biotechnology, astronomy, and computer science will soon find themselves overwhelmed with information — so the next generation of computer scientists will have to learn think in terms of Internet scale of petabytes of data. For the most part, university students have used rather modest computing systems to support their studies, but these machines fail to churn through enough data to really challenge and train young minds to ponder the mega-scale problems of tomorrow. 'If they imprint on these small systems, that becomes their frame of reference and what they're always thinking about,' said Jim Spohrer, a director at IBM's Almaden Research Center. This year, the National Science Foundation funded 14 universities that want to teach their students how to grapple with big data questions. Students are beginning to work with data sets like the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, the largest public data set in the world. The telescope takes detailed images of large chunks of the sky and produces about 30 terabytes of data each night. 'Science these days has basically turned into a data-management problem,' says Jimmy Lin, an associate professor at the University of Maryland."
Re:The LSST? (Score:3, Funny)
You clearly aren't prepared to think in a future frame of reference.
That's the consequence of studying with equipment that existed at the moment you were working with it.
Future generations won't have that problem, as they're already studying with equipment that will be paid for and released to the university several years after their graduation.
Re:Students don't need to think at internet scale (Score:3, Funny)