What could a computer do with a yottabyte of RAM?

[jmacavali]

Cat videos. People would make a ton of cat videos.

I had to LOL on this one. Nice.

Porn. They would use it for porn.

Porn and Cat Videos....to some people they are the same thing...LOL

....
Also, why would we need video of every second of every day of our entire lives?

Google Glass anyone? Why do we need 98% of the videos we have? Think about all the "selfies" - the pictures people take of themselves and post online. Why do we need those? People tend to think that other people need to know what they are doing at all times...the logical next step in the process is to start posting videos as status updates. I hate to get off-topic here but we live in a world where people are getting too lazy to read or write. Soon everything will just be in video context - because it's easier to make and to listen to. So to tie it back to the OP, yes I think at some point everyone (or at least the young people) will be posting/recoding their daily lives and sharing them for the world to see. And we'll all be sitting in the old folks home, saying "I remember when we only needed 1 TB of storage and 16GB of RAM was overkill for anything we would ever need too do."

 

[BK_123]

Google Glass anyone? Why do we need 98% of the videos we have? Think about all the "selfies" - the pictures people take of themselves and post online. Why do we need those? People tend to think that other people need to know what they are doing at all times...the logical next step in the process is to start posting videos as status updates. I hate to get off-topic here but we live in a world where people are getting too lazy to read or write. Soon everything will just be in video context - because it's easier to make and to listen to. So to tie it back to the OP, yes I think at some point everyone (or at least the young people) will be posting/recoding their daily lives and sharing them for the world to see. And we'll all be sitting in the old folks home, saying "I remember when we only needed 1 TB of storage and 16GB of RAM was overkill for anything we would ever need too do."

I ain't one of those people who has to take a picture and post it to Instagram and then Facebook of what I am eating or constantly saying I am doing this and that, I don't want the whole world to know. I have to agree with the getting lazy part, That is too true, We are becoming more reliant on technology, We rely on phones for our calendars, reminders, staying in touch with people, These days a smartphone is like a must have piece of equipment. I will admit that I am one of these people who are lazy and rely's on technology but everyone has different uses.

 

[cboucher]

I had to LOL on this one. Nice.


Porn and Cat Videos....to some people they are the same thing...LOL



Google Glass anyone? Why do we need 98% of the videos we have? Think about all the "selfies" - the pictures people take of themselves and post online. Why do we need those? People tend to think that other people need to know what they are doing at all times...the logical next step in the process is to start posting videos as status updates. I hate to get off-topic here but we live in a world where people are getting too lazy to read or write. Soon everything will just be in video context - because it's easier to make and to listen to. So to tie it back to the OP, yes I think at some point everyone (or at least the young people) will be posting/recoding their daily lives and sharing them for the world to see. And we'll all be sitting in the old folks home, saying "I remember when we only needed 1 TB of storage and 16GB of RAM was overkill for anything we would ever need too do."

True dat...

I've always thought Facebook was a means by which soccer moms and teenage girls could announce their locations and daily routines to their potential stalkers.

 

[XYZAFFA1R]

So a yottabyte of storage would be as big as multiple states and would cost 100 trillion dollars, almost twice the gross domestic product of the world.
A computer with 1000 yottabytes of storage could contain HD video footage of every second in the lives of every human who ever existed.
Now imagine some time in the future humans created a computer with a yottabyte of storage and a yottabyte of RAM, what could this computer calculate? What would it be capable of? Would it be able to, say, create a simulation of every molecule in a area to figure out the exact probabilities of different outcomes? Would it be able to generate a map of the universe and figure out exactly where all the hospitable planets are?

It would do nothing modern computers aren't capable of. Modern CPU's can only handle 32 gigs of ram, so that much would be pointless and do nothing.

 

[root]

So a yottabyte of storage would be as big as multiple states and would cost 100 trillion dollars, almost twice the gross domestic product of the world.

I assume you refer to this:

it's not really true.
a 4TB external drive is available in a 3.5" form factor,
that's roughly 1" tall 3.5" wide and 5" long. cost £151 from Dabs
so 1TB = £37.50 (or there about)
so 1 Petabyte = £37,000 (thirty seven thousand)
1 extabyte = 37,000,000 (thirty seven million)
1 zetta byte = £37,000,000,000 (thirty seven billion)
1 yotta byte = 37,000,000,000,000 (thirty seven trillion pounds).

a fair amount, just over twice the national debt of the states in fact, but nowhere near twice the worlds GDP.

List of countries by GDP (nominal) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

which the UN estimates to be around 70 trillion dollars. since I started my working in British pounds that's 45 trillion pounds.

so 1 yottabyte of storage (in currently available external HDDs) costs about 3/4 of total world GDP.

now lets look at the size.
(1YB = 1000ZB = 1,000,000EB = 1,000,000,000PB = 1,000,000,000,000TB)
so in 4TB disks we need
1,000,000,000,000 / 4 = 250,000,000,000 (two hundred and fifty billion disks)
at ~1 x 4 x 6" (which allows for some airflow) per disk.

well 10" x 40" x 60" would be 1000 disks.

the average computer rack is 42U high, 19" wide, and 36" deep (I'm guessing on the depth) 1u = 1.25" = 52.5" (you can get 46u racks, so I'll assume you can stack ten disks long side up going up in a rack)
so we can roughly squeeze 2000 disks into a single rack.
(standing on end that's about 20 across the rack, ten disks going up the rack, and ten disks deep. (20 x 10 x 10 = 2000)
250,000,000,000 / 2000 = 125,000,000

So one hundred and twenty five million racks of disks.

with each rack being 19" wide and 36" deep
to allow for the actual rack frame work, cabling and airflow as well as 2ft corridors between racks for people to walk. we'll call each rack standard height.
5ft deep and 2ft wide. (10 square feet per rack installation)

so with each rack needing 10 square feet of space. and with a storage density of (8EB per rack) you end up needing 10,125,000 square feet of space for 1 YB.

there are 5280 feet in 1 mile, so a square 1 mile long and 1 mile wide has 27,878,400 square feet.
just over twice what we need.


so while it's a cool rumour that 1 YB of data costs twice all the money in the world and fills half of America.
in fact it just costs a lot, and would only fill a reasonable sized village inside a small town if made of external hard drives.