A 3-minute rant on the "deluge of data" in astronomy

A rant presented at the sixth dot Astronomy conference, 8 December 2014, Chicago.

1. A 3-minute rant on the "deluge of data" in astronomy by Geert Barentsen (@GeertHub) 1
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3. Pixel rates of our largest optical surveys double every 41 months 3
4. CCD-based astronomy is limited by glass and atmosphere; it does not track Moore’s law! 4
5. CPU transistor counts double every 23 months 5
6. Supercomputer FLOPS double every 13 months 6
7. Internet speeds double every 16 months 7
8. Disk drive storage doubles every 23 months 8
9. Storage bus speeds double every 35 months 9
10. 2000 (SDSS) vs 2022 (LSST), if trends continue: • 81x more pixels; • 190x faster I/O; • 2565x more storage; • 120 578x faster internet; • 1 202 277x faster supercomputers. 10
11. The increase in CCD data is vastly outstripped by the deluge of computing power. (Not true for radio astronomy.) 11
12. Let’s ride the tsunami of computing power! Graphs and data points are here: http://github.com/barentsen/tech-progress-data 12