Forward Looking Projects

In last couple of years, working as a freelance, my clients sometime float very interesting forward looking projects and ideas. These ideas sometime start out sounding wacky. But I enjoy the challenge to think, brainstorm and work with colleagues with totally different backgrounds across organizational silos. In the end, I usually land up researching feasibility of these projects for the clients anyway.

I wonder if this blog could be used to start discussing such projects, sharing what my research revealed and getting feedback from others.

I mentioned one such project in my previous blog entry about a very large multi-petabyte archive starting at 2PB and growing to 10PB within three years or so.

During my research in finding the potential issues with creating such large archive, I came across several initiatives. These projects are focusing on addressing different issues: power consumption, heat generation, single global namespace, ability to search the archive for specific information and retrieve a specific file or document within reasonable time etc.

Internet Archive seems to be the right place for starting such work as they are attempting to archive a large portion of Internet. I am particularly interested in the work, CR Saikley and team is doing on PetaBox at Capricorn Technologies focusing on power consumption and heat dissipation. Another interesting project is being done by Aloke Guha and his team on power management and MAID at Copan Systems.

In my opinion, there are quite a few other issues that need to be addressed before a reasonable solution for a large multi-petabyte archive can become a reality.