Big data in life: From Megabytes to Zetabytes, an accelerated path.

Big data in life: From Megabytes to Zetabytes, an accelerated path.

To have an idea of ​​what the units of measurement in the digital world mean, I will take as a practical unit of measurement a book, "Introduction to the Practice of Statistics" (Mccabe, Moore and Craig, Sixth Edition, 2009, 1100 pages) with a digital weight of 20 Megabytes (20 Mb)

The Library of Congress of the United States has approximately 36.5 million books. If for simplicity we assume that each book has 20 Mb, then the digital value will be 73 million Mb.

The capacity to generate data in all formats grows exponentially, specialists in this field are continuously creating units of measurement. The table shows the passage from Mb to Gigabyte (1024 Mb), to Terabyte (1024 Gb), and so on. The table shows up to the Geopbyte.

There is already a monster (remembering the dinosaurs) the Brontobyte = 1024 x 1024 x Zb. And because you can not create the Dinobyte (in honor of the Tyrannosaurus rex) equivalent to 1024 x 1024 x Bb. Does your head hurt? Me too.

To bring it to the human scale understandable and imaginable, we have converted the digital content of the Library of Congress: One Terabyte (Tb) is only 0.1% of the content of the Library, but one Petabyte (Pb) is already 1.47 times the Library. The libraries of all the research centers, universities and companies in the United States are equivalent to 2 petabytes. In Peru, considering that there are universities with only 200 books, the total number of university libraries, including the National Library and all public libraries, may reach 2% or 3% of a petabyte.

For 205, the available data will be measured in Zetabytes (Zb) and it is estimated that there will be 175 Zb. If today, a ZB equals one and a half million Libraries of Congress, what will be the value of these 175 Zb?