Greco Exabyte
October 27th, 2007
I have not been to the movies in quit awhile, so on my last flight from Singapore I took the time to watch an in flight movie. I happened to select Ocean’s 13, which starred George Clooney and Brad Pitt. As some of you may know the plot is about breaking a Casino in Las Vegas by winning $500 M in 3 1/2 Min.
In order to break the casino they must be able to crash a super computer called “Greco” which monitors every player through video cameras and heat sensors as well as every gaming device, to detect cheaters. Greco goes beyond artificial intellligence, it can reason. The only weakness with Greco is that it takes 3 1/2 minutes to reboot. So the Ocean team must find a way to crash Greco, in order to break the casino during the reboot time.
What was interesting to me is how they described this super computer. Usually such a computer would be described in terms of giga flops or other measurements of processing power. Instead, Greco is described as a “field of exabytes”. In order to explain what an exabyte is to George Clooney, Brad Pitt describes it as “a million terabytes”. I thought, wow, storage has really taken center stage! First a Nobel Prize for GMR recording heads, then super computers described by storage capacity, and now Brad and George talking casually about exabytes and terabytes. While the use of exabyte might be exagerated for the entertainment value today, I believe we will see an installation with an exabyte of storage in the next 5 years. Thanks to the magnetic recording break through of the GMR recording head, there are already installations with tens of petabytes, and individual disk capacities in the Terabyte range.
Click on this link to see a preview of Ocean’s 13. It may win an academy award!
