Experts at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) at Stanford University believe they may have the biggest database in the world. While they only stated collecting data in 1999, they have reached the 500TB mark. Let\’s put this in persepctive. A Terabye is one trillion bytes, or 1000GB. The info in the database could fill 1 billion books, 60 times the books found in the Library of Congress.
The database is called BaBar and has adopted the children\’s book character as its mascot. The name was derived from a type of subatomic particle the scientists are studying, the B-Bar.
They record every \”interesting\” particle collision, which takes about 30K. Much of the data is redundant. They have been fastidious about backing up their data.
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