[Pointrel-discuss] Slashdot | Getting Students To Think At Internet Scale

[Paul D. F. <pdf...@ku...>]

http://science.slashdot.org/story/09/10/13/0114230/Getting-Students-To-Think-At-Internet-Scale
"The NY Times reports that researchers and workers in fields as diverse as
biotechnology, astronomy, and computer science will soon find themselves
overwhelmed with information — so the next generation of computer scientists
will have to learn think in terms of Internet scale of petabytes of data.
For the most part, university students have used rather modest computing
systems to support their studies, but these machines fail to churn through
enough data to really challenge and train young minds to ponder the
mega-scale problems of tomorrow. 'If they imprint on these small systems,
that becomes their frame of reference and what they're always thinking
about,' said Jim Spohrer, a director at IBM's Almaden Research Center. This
year, the National Science Foundation funded 14 universities that want to
teach their students how to grapple with big data questions. Students are
beginning to work with data sets like the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope,
the largest public data set in the world. The telescope takes detailed
images of large chunks of the sky and produces about 30 terabytes of data
each night. 'Science these days has basically turned into a data-management
problem,' says Jimmy Lin, an associate professor at the University of Maryland."
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/technology/12data.html
http://www.lsst.org/lsst/science/datamgmt_products

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/