• Question: Are there any jobs a scientist can do involving working, or handling yottabytes?

    Asked by mayenn_ to Anna, George, Jodi, Rob, Stefan on 18 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Anna Scaife

      Anna Scaife answered on 18 Nov 2014:

      That’s a lot of data… not sure I’d want a job handling that…

    • Photo: Rob Appleyard

      Rob Appleyard answered on 18 Nov 2014:

      Right now? No. My work happens on the petabyte scale (1PB = 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes). 1000 PB is 1 exabyte, 1000 exabytes = 1 zettabyte, 1000 zettabytes = 1 yottabyte.

      I’ve seen an estimate of the size of the world wide web as being about 4 zettabytes, so it seems that the human race has a fair way to go before we get to generating just one yottabyte, let alone managing it or working with it.

    • Photo: George Ryall

      George Ryall answered on 18 Nov 2014:

      Not Yet. There are a number of experiments coming up over the next decade that might push into Exabytes.

    • Photo: Jodi Schneider

      Jodi Schneider answered on 18 Nov 2014:

      Eventually. If you work on preserving data, you’d have to decide which of the data to preserve. Especially because copying and labelling data is part of how we preserve it!

    • Photo: Stefan Lines

      Stefan Lines answered on 18 Nov 2014:

      Nope. Thank goodness. I can just about deal with several Terabytes.

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