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Computer Technology Forecast for Virtual
Observatories
September 1, 2000
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Download PDF
BibTex
Authors

Jim Gray
Publication Type
TechReport
Pages
11
Number
MSR-TR-2000-102


Abstract
Related Info
Abstract
The Virtual Observatory integrating all the world’s astronomy data into one world-wide
telescope will consume vast quantities of storage, processing, and bandwidth. It will require new
kinds of software. This talk discusses the surprise-free technology predictions that indicate that
the Virtual Observatory can house several petabytes of data and that it can be quickly accessible
to everyone everywhere. It argues that the memory hierarchy will force us to a scale-out
approach with many commodity components each managing a part of the VO database or
pipeline. The paper has 3 main points: (1) Technology progress in processors, storage, and
networks is keeping pace with the growth of astronomy datasets. (2) Access times are not
improving so rapidly, hence we must use parallelism to ameliorate this gap. With parallelism, we
will be able to scan the archives within an hour. This parallelism should be automatic. I believe
database technology can give this automatic parallelism. (3) The Virtual Observatory will be a
federation of database systems. As such, the federation needs to define interoperability standards.
FITS is a good start, but the community could benefit by looking at progress in the commercial
sector in using directories, portals, XML, and SOAP for data interchange.
Related Info
Related Files
 tr-2000-102.doc
Research Areas
 Computer vision
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