HSO Proposed Surveillance System
By Michael J. Sniffen
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency says in its documents that it is trying to design software that could access and analyze an unprecedented amount of data, ``measured in petabytes.''
In computer jargon, a byte is what it takes electronically to represent one letter of the alphabet. A petabyte is a quadrillion, or 1,000,000,000,000,000, bytes.
Most personal computers now come with storage space for two to 20 gigabytes of information. A petabyte is 1 million times larger than a gigabyte.
Such an accumulation of data would dwarf most existing databases.
One of the largest databases on the Internet is 100 terabytes and contains an archive of five years' worth of Web pages. But that's just a tenth of one petabyte.
Several years ago Microsoft's Bill Gates put a vast collection of satellite photos of the earth's surface on a huge Web site he called the TerraServer. That site stores 3.3 terabytes.
The data the Pentagon envisions would include all kinds of visual and text files in various formats. But if it were all simple text, one petabyte would contain enough room for almost 40 pages of information on each of the more than 8 billion human beings on Earth.
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