100 Years of Digital Data

Abstract

The Information Age has brought with it a deluge of digital data. Current estimates are that in 2006, 161 exabytes (10¹⁸ bytes) of digital data were created from cell phones, computers, iPods, DVDs, sensors, satellites, scientific instruments, and other sources, providing a foundation for our digital world. Migrating digital content through new generations of storage media, making sense of its content, and ensuring that needed information is accessible now and for the foreseeable future constitute some of the most critical challenges of the Information Age. The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) is leading the development and deployment of a comprehensive infrastructure for managing, storing, preserving, and using digital data. In this talk, Berman discusses SDSC's approach to building and deploying data-oriented computational and data cyberinfrastructure, and describes the next generation of challenges and opportunities for the data that drives the Information Age.