Tuesday, May 7, 2013

E-mails, Facebook and Google make the Large Hadron Collider look like a dwarf

Big, Bigger, Biggest Data...


Only five years ago, in 2008, when CERN's Large Hadron Collider started to produce data, we thought of the LHC-data as Big Data. 

But already by the end of 2012 the LHC-data have been dwarfed by the data continuously generated by the world community, using telecommunication, Internet and its many social media and business applications.

The May-issue of WIRED shows a nice info graphic of Big Data. (data for 2012, given in terabytes (10^12 bytes) per year)



The annual amount of information in business-emails is almost two hundred times the annual LHC-data production.

The content annually uploaded to Facebook equals twelve times the annual LHC-data production.

Google's search index equals six times the annual LHC-data production.

And video's annually uploaded to YouTube more or less equal the annual LHC-data production.