Petabyte age

Everything in computing needs storage: blogs, instant messengers, social networks and personal documents, all reside on our own computers or someone else’s, for example, Gmail in the case of emails. As the amount of data available increases, so do the storage requirements and its units of measurement.

Storage units in computing begin with bytes (or 8 bits). A little over a thousand bytes (that is, 1024 bytes) included in Kilobyte (KB), 1024 KB included in Megabyte (MB), and 1024 MB included in Gigabyte (GB), which is the most common storage unit today. This multiplication of 1024 continues to define Terabyte and then Petabyte.

The petabyte is considered a milestone in scientific approach, to the point that it is sometimes called the age of petabytes. What distinguishes this huge amount of data from the previously available limited data is the prediction that in the Petabye Era, scientific researchers would no longer need to create hypotheses, models, and then test whether or not their hypothesis and model are correct.

For example, instead of hypothesizing that a certain age group is more susceptible to health risks, or that a certain geographic area is likely to be affected by political unrest or uncertainty due to a certain reason and contrasting this with some data, advanced data mining could be used. Such mining of petabytes of data would allow a virtually unlimited flow of information, such as scanning news around the world, to be processed to identify problem areas along with trends and issues of “ high importance or severity ” without the need to identify their causes. underlying. This type of ‘geotagging’ has already started in the form of projects such as Google Zeitgeist and Europe Media Monitor – EMM. So in Petabyte Age, the old scientific methods of hypothesis, modeling, and testing are about to be replaced by what vast amounts of data tell us. In short, inferences from big data collected from around the world would not need models of their explanation, as the numbers would speak for themselves. For example, for rapid epidemic monitoring, war prediction, voting patterns, etc. In his article entitled ‘The End of Theory’, Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired writes: ‘Science can advance even without coherent models, unified theories, or really no mechanistic explanation.’ More radical views have even called the Petabyte Age the end of science, while others have dismissed it as too futuristic.

Terminologies have already been defined beyond Petabyte, this includes Exabyte, Zettabyte, Yottabyte, and Brontobyte, each starting at Petabyte and multiplying by 1024 to get to the next terminology. But only time will tell whether the Petabyte Age with the capacity to process millions of data points and aggregate information through numerous sources and sensors using processing clouds would change the science or not.