This post was written by Cydney Stevens, Senior Programs Manager, High Performance Computing Solutions
“You are my density!”
Favorite lines from films, aka “movie speak.”
Quick! Name the film.
The mind quickly parses through its recesses – decades of stored information. The majority relegated to the “vault”, complicating the ability to easily pull the movie title off the tip of the tongue or visualize more than vague characters through the mind’s eye to help correlate disparate and related details to come up with more than the one liner.
Accessing all hosted data relies upon a sophisticated simplicity – based upon a complex usage model combined with a constant need for capacity.
Accuracy depends upon data richness and locality. It’s the difference between our own short or long term memory and akin to local and archive in storage topologies. Pinpointing where and what data resides within our brain is similar to a hierarchical storage environment where the minds short term memory, the “movie speak” in this case, would be equivalent to tier 0 or 1 (depending) while subsequent tiers maintain more in depth data such as the movie title, its debut, actors, sequels, etc.
Archive, where data lives, also determines the time between an instantaneous or drawn out response. Density, or how much and what is able to be stored, is critical to the completeness of a response.
Whether it’s live or from disk or tape – storage is a critical dependency.
“Please excuse the crudity of this model as I didn’t have time to build it to scale …”
Research suggests humans are capable of retaining up to 2.5 Petabytes (PB) of data. Quantifying our own internal capabilities is challenging enough let alone measuring demands for artificial intelligence. But we must! We’re the ones creating data that is driving the order of magnitude conversations such as the more recent extolling of internet traffic exceeding an Exabyte by 2015. That’s a lot of data!
Regardless of our technology habits – every connection and interaction has a huge dependency and impact on the efficiency and capabilities of IT infrastructures. At present growth – both in collection and distribution – storage becomes more critical to accommodate for a range of variables and policies, to support requirements that are growing exponentially – daily (v. annually just a few short years ago).
“If you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything.”
Lucky for us the brain is self-determining. Our subconscious administrator is a terrific steward of our internal archives and data management policies. Synthesized memory and data management, however, is vastly more complex – and where our own IT heroes are required to compensate for all of our human factors as well as plan for increased capacity, data layout, localities, security, resiliency, etc., as we stream collective conscious to the EB!
Real genius behind well designed architectures frees us from grappling with really big concepts, like the brain on the system over a network or through to archive. Leaving us more available space and dedicated time to create, share and store … more … ideas, data and so on!