The World Wide Wow

February 26, 2010

By Rebecca Gannon

(WICHITA, Kan.)

How many emails do you read a day, or log onto Facebook? How many text messages do you send every day? Now multiply that the population of Kansas. Now, the United States. The rest of the world.

All of that digital information piles up. Now, researchers are figuring out ways to store it. Because if they don't, there may be a day when the Internet overloads.

You use it every day. So does everyone else. The Internet - digital data - surrounds us. You can't touch it, but you can see it on your screen. What you cannot see is how big it is.

The United States Postal Service handles 198 billion parcels a year. We send 210 billion emails a day. The photo card in your average digital camera holds two gigabytes worth of information. That's enough paper to fill a pick up truck bed -- twice.

And for as much as there is out there, more is coming every day.

"YouTube in 2007 actually used more bandwidth than all of the Internet did in 2000," explained Bret Weber of Wichita's LSI Corporation. "That kind of puts in perspective, a little bit."

Here's another way to look at YouTube. People upload 20 hours of video to YouTube every minute. That equals 100,000 films every week.

With so much information out there, and more coming, what keeps the Internet running?

As Dr. Ravi Pendse of Wichita State University said, "Somebody's uploading, somebody's downloading, and all this information has to be properly organized."

That's why two Wichita organizations now work together to save the world wide web. LSI Corporation and Wichita State University created the Center for Storage Networking Research last fall.

"This growth of digital data that's out there is really why we're doing this," said LSI's Weber. "And being able to do future architectures that can cope with this amount of data."

It may just look like a few students sitting at computers. But - in the digital world, as in the real world looks can be deceiving.

"Our biggest asset, being a university, is - we have a phenomenal group of students," said Dr. Pendse. "Very curious students, who oftentimes ask questions we don't have answers for. And that's when we begin to do research."

Here's another example. You know all the photos you upload to websites, and the emails you send to your friends? They get duplicated; from your computer to your friends' computer, and all the networks between. A single email can be duplicated as much as 30 times.

"There's no sense in keeping many, many copies of duplicate data around," said Weber, "because it's just additional storage that could be used for new data."

Your information just floats out there, waiting for you - or someone else - to access it. The Center will focus on delivering information to your computer faster, more reliably, with more security.

"If something is not done," said Dr. Pendse, "we could reach a bottleneck, and essential and critical information would not be available."

The bottleneck is years away. But as Dr. Pendse put it, "If I just have information, and the information is not organized, then it's not information anymore. It's junk."

So it's up to Wichita keep the world wide web from shutting down.

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