10 exa, that’s my number
It seems every year someone makes a statement about people not possibly needing the full extent of a new computing resources, but it always seems that needs grow to fill the void. So anybody want to play a game? Name an amount of storage that you think you will never need. I calculated it out, and NTSC-quality video of the entirety of your life would comfortably fit in a petabyte — that’s an application I could think of evolving, but it’s still not that resource-dependent, relatively speaking (modern hard disks, for instance, have a million times as much space as a floppy disk from 20 years ago. All we need is another factor of 10,000 or so.)
The total amount of information in the world was calculated some years ago to be 10,000 LOC, or 1 exabyte, or 1000 petabytes. So I cannot imagine needing more than 10 exa. What would I possibly do with all that storage? I don’t need full-motion video of the lives of everyone in the world. I don’t think, anyway. And aren’t network speeds supposed to reach the point where local storage becomes useless any day now? (Prediction: it’s not going to happen. Ever.) So, 10 exa, that’s my number.
Processor speed, however, I cannot even imagine a number I couldn’t use. There are always mathematical applications that could grow to fill the need. That Sandia system can do 1.8 teraflops. That’s not nearly enough. I can see games eventually needing petaflop capabilities for rendering and physics models (I might actually turn into a video game player at that point.) But an exaflop: now really, what the heck would we use that for in our daily lives?
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