El cerebro humano tiene un billón de neuronas, y cada una forma mil conexiones con otras, de manera que pueden trabajar en varias memorias al mismo tiempo. Si midiéramos la capacidad de nuestro cerebro, podríamos decir que se acerca a 2,5 petabytes (un millón de gigabytes). Si lo comparamos, podríamos decir que equivale a 300 años en programas de televisión..

www.pcgameshardware.de/Astronomie-Thema-239073/News/Acht-...

This visualization shows early test renderings of a global computational model of Earth's atmosphere based on data from NASA's Goddard Earth Observing System Model, Version 5 (GEOS-5). This particular run, called Nature Run 2, was run on a supercomputer, spanned 2 years of simulation time at 30 minute intervals, and produced Petabytes of output.

The visualization spans a little more than 7 days of simulation time which is 354 time steps. The time period was chosen because a simulated category-4 typhoon developed off the coast of China.

The 7 day period is repeated several times during the course of the visualization.

Credit: NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio

Read more or download here: svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/goto?4180

NASA image use policy.

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center enables NASA’s mission through four scientific endeavors: Earth Science, Heliophysics, Solar System Exploration, and Astrophysics. Goddard plays a leading role in NASA’s accomplishments by contributing compelling scientific knowledge to advance the Agency’s mission.

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Thank you for visiting - ❤ with gratitude! Fave if you like it, add comments below, get beautiful HDR prints at qualityHDR.com.

Last summer I went to an open house event at the Internet Archive in San Francisco, known for its Wayback Machine to search the internet as it was in the past.

The Internet Archive is a nonprofit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, such as web sites, software applications/games, music, movies/videos, moving images, and nearly three million public-domain books. In addition to its archiving function, the Archive is an activist organization, advocating for a free and open Internet.

The Internet Archive purchased a discontinued church in San Francisco. Upstairs is the big hall, which used the be the main church hall. It now has two purposes: Event venue and datacenter. They have now 65 petabytes (65,000 GB) of disk storage, and add 2 petabytes disks per month. This shot shows one of the wings with disk humming arrays.

The Internet Archive is using our TWiki collaboration platform to coordinate work internally. Thank you for using TWiki!

I processed a balanced HDR photo from a RAW exposure, and increased the color saturation (no, you didn't!). This is a very rare exception, in this case it helped to make the image pop with the strong yellow and orange colors.

-- © Peter Thoeny, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, HDR, 1 RAW exposure, NEX-6, _DSC8822_hdr1bal1g

Thank you for visiting - ❤ with gratitude! Fave if you like it, add comments below, get beautiful HDR prints at qualityHDR.com.

Last night I went to an open house event at the Internet Archive in San Francisco. They chose the date 2015-10-21, the day when Marty McFly and Doc Brown arrived in the future.

The Internet Archive is a nonprofit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, such as web sites, software applications/games, music, movies/videos, moving images, and nearly three million public-domain books. As you can imagine, this requires a huge amount of storage - now over 15 petabytes. In addition to its archiving function, the Archive is an activist organization, advocating for a free and open Internet.

There were stands with hands-on demos on book scanning, playing vintage games, and playing 3-D video games with the Oculus Rift virtual reality goggles. We then were ushered upstairs to the big hall for presentations - the building is a former church. At the evening they presented the first Internet Archive Hero Award to the Grateful Dead, which were pioneers in sharing. The Internet Archive is a truly visionary organization let by Chairman Brewster Khale.

The Internet Archive is using our TWiki collaboration platform to coordinate work internally. Thank you for using TWiki!

I processed a balanced HDR photo from a RAW exposure.

-- © Peter Thoeny, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, HDR, 1 RAW exposure, NEX-6, _DSC8761_hdr1bal1e

Eye Filmmuseum is a film archive, museum, and cinema in Amsterdam that preserves and presents both Dutch and foreign films screened in the Netherlands.

Location and history

Eye Filmmuseum is located in the Overhoeks neighborhood of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Its predecessor was the Dutch Historical Film Archive, founded in 1946 by David van Staveren, Felix Halverstad, and directors of Filmtheater Kriterion Piet Meerburg and Paul Kijzer. Following the accession of the archives of the Filmtheater de Uitkijk, the archive was renamed the Netherlands Filmmuseum under the leadership of its first director, film collector Jan de Vaal. The Filmmuseum was located in Kriterion and Stedelijk Museum until 1975, when de Vaal succeeded in acquiring a discrete space for the Filmmuseum in the Vondelpark Pavilion. In 2009, Nederlands Filmmuseum merged with Holland Film, the Netherlands Institute for Film Education and the Filmbank and plans were announced for a new home on the north bank of Amsterdam's waterfront. The Filmmuseum was renamed the Eye Film Institute Netherlands and was officially opened on April 4, 2012, by Queen Beatrix.

Buildings

Eye Filmmuseum

The Eye Filmmuseum building is designed by Delugan Meissl Associated Architects, whose other projects include the Porsche Museum in Stuttgart. The building features two gallery exhibition spaces, one 300-seat cinema, two 127-seat cinemas, and a fourth intimate cinema of about 67 seats. One of the gallery spaces is devoted to a permanent exhibition on the technical and aesthetic histories of cinema. The exhibit includes historical equipment drawn from the Museum's collection of approximately 1,500 cinematic apparatuses, as well as an immersive presentation of about one hundred film clips from the Museum's archive, including Dutch and international films dating from the silent era and beyond. The second gallery space is dedicated to experimental cinema or expanded cinema, a commitment which dates back to the Filmmuseum's founding and the weekly screenings it organized at the Stedelijk Museum in the 1950s under the emerging aegis of cinema as a "seventh art."[ Past exhibitions in this space have focused on auteurs and cinematographers, as well as video artists and visual artists like Ryoji Ikeda and Anthony McCall.

Eye Collection Center

In 2016, Eye opened its new Collection Center, designed by cepezed. The collection is made up of analog, digitized, and born-digital materials which are situated beside a sound restoration and digitization studio, a digital image restoration studio, and a grading and scanning suite. The collection includes 210,000 cans of acetate film, 57,000 film titles, 2.5 petabytes of digital data, 82,000 posters, 700,000 photographs, 27,000 books, 2,000 journals, 1,500 pre-cinema and film apparatuses, 4,500 magic lantern slides, 7,000 musical scores, and 250,000 press cuttings.

The collection originally consisted of films from the Uitkijk archive, compiled by members of the Dutch Filmliga (1927–1933).[12] After joining the International Federation of Film archives (FIAF) in 1947, the Filmmuseum started to actively collect and preserve Dutch film productions. Since then, a number of significant collections have been acquired, ranging from Dutch distributors (Desmet, Centra, and UIP); filmmakers (Joris Ivens, Johan van der Keuken, and Louis van Gasteren); and producers (Matthijs van Heijningen and Kees Kasander) to institutions and organizations, such as the Netherlands Film Academy; the Netherlands Film Fund; and the Netherlands Institute for Animation Film (NIAf). The collection also includes many seminal silent film works, Hollywood classics, international arthouse productions, and independent filmmakers of international renown.

Nitrate Bunkers

Eye stores 30,000 cans of flammable nitrate film in bunkers near the coast of North Holland in Overveen, Castricum and Heemskerk. These nitrate films date between 1896 and the mid-1950s and include a unique collection of 68mm film. Two of these bunkers were built during the Second World War to protect Dutch art museum holdings from theft and destruction; Rembrandt's The Night Watch was among a few of the paintings which were stored in the Castricum bunker for part of the war.

Restorations

Recent silent film Eye restorations include the formerly lost film Beyond the Rocks (1922) starring Gloria Swanson, J'accuse! (1919) by Abel Gance, The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928) by Germain Dulac, Raskolnikov (1923) by Robert Wiene, Flower of Evil (1915) by Carmine Gallone, and Shoes (1916) by Lois Weber.

Restorations of Dutch films include Wan Pipel (1976) by Dutch-Surinamese director Pim de la Parra, Zeemansvrouwen (1930) by Henk Kleinmann, Karakter (1997) by Mike van Diem, Spetters (1980) by Paul Verhoeven, and Abel (1986) by Alex van Warmerdam.

Other restorations include Eve (1962) by Joseph Losey, M (1931) by Fritz Lang, and We Can't Go Home Again (1979) by Nicholas Ray.

Projects

Eye is performing a major film digitization and preservation project together with IBM and Thought Equity Motion, a provider of video platform and rights development services. The project involves scanning and storing more than 150 million discrete DPX files on LTO Gen5 Tape in the Linear Tape File System format.

The institute's youth platform is named MovieZone (previously MovieSquad).

Annual events

International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (November)

Eye International Conference (May)

(Wikipedia)

Das EYE Filmmuseum (früher Nederlands Filmmuseum) in Amsterdam ist das nationale Filmmuseum der Niederlande.

Geschichte

Das Museum wurde 1946 als Nederlands Historisch Filmarchief gegründet und besteht seit 1952 unter seinem heutigen Namen. Seit 1972 befand sich das Filmmuseum in einem Pavillon im Amsterdamer Vondelpark. Der Vondelparkpaviljoen wurde 1874 bis 1881 nach Plänen von Willem Hamer jr. im Stil der Neorenaissance errichtet.

Das Filmmuseum verfügt über etwa 46.000 Filme (davon 7 Millionen Meter Zelluloidfilm aus der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts), mehr als 35.000 Filmplakate und rund 450.000 Fotografien. Selbstgesetztes Ziel des Museums ist die Bewahrung des filmgeschichtlichen Erbes und ebenso die Erhaltung einer lebendigen Filmkultur in den Niederlanden. Daher handelt es sich beim Bestand vor allem um niederländische Produktionen, aber auch ausländische Filme, die in niederländischen Kinos gelaufen sind. Das Museum hat zwei Filmvorführsäle und wird jährlich von mehr als 150.000 Besuchern frequentiert. Es führt auch Restaurierungen durch. Der Institution angeschlossen ist die größte niederländische Bibliothek für Filmliteratur. Im Keller des Museums ist ein Café-Restaurant untergebracht. 1991 wurde das Gebäude umfassend renoviert.

Am 5. April 2012 zog das Amsterdamer Filmmuseum in einen Neubau auf das Overhoeks genannte, ehemals dem niederländischen Ölkonzerns Shell gehörende Gelände am Nordufer der IJ, zu Füßen des Shell-Towers, um. Als Sieger aus dem ausgeschriebenen internationalen Gestaltungswettbewerb ging 2005 der Entwurf des österreichischen Architekturbüros Delugan Meissl Associated Architects hervor. Nach dem Umzug trägt das Museum den Namen EYE. Filmmuseum.

(Wikipedia)

Andras runs a burn-in program at he Computer Center at CERN. The site has 12PB -- petabytes, as in 12,000,000,000,000,000 bytes -- of online HD storage, and another 34PB of robotically accessible off-line tape storage.

We currently live in Elysium — the heaven on earth.

## 1. We are privileged

Think about it. If you are a Westerner, from Europe, from America, or much of the developed world, you are living in heaven.

You have no more Bubonic Plague to kill you as a child. Most diseases are cured, besides AIDS, and things like cancer.

You have enough to feed yourself. You will not starve to death.

You won’t freeze to death. You have no fear of being killed by the neighboring tribe. You won’t die of thirst in the desert.

## 2. We have all the tools

We have wifi. We have smartphones. We have cars. We have digital technology, and the internet.

We have access to infinite petabytes of data. We can learn anything we want to, with the touch of our fingers.

We have good public schools, that teach us the fundamentals of language.

We live in society with our fellow human beings. We have brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, uncles and aunts, and other people we can give our love to— and be loved back in return.

## 3. Gatekeepers don’t exist anymore

There are no more gatekeepers. If your dream is to pursue your passion for a living, with the internet you can make it possible. Upload your film on YouTube. Share your writing on a blog. Share your ideas on social media. Share your photos on Instagram.

You have coffee, and access to spices that even kings from 100 years ago didn’t have access to.

## 4. We are dying of thirst

Yet, we kind of live in a hell.

A hell of materialism, consumerism, and dissatisfaction. Wanting more.

It is like Sisyphus— forced by Zeus to roll the heavy stone uphill for the rest of eternity — only to have the stone roll back on us.

Or we are dying of thirst, yet whenever we try to drink the water, it recedes from us. We are hungry, yet whenever we try to take a bite of the fruit— the apple tree draws away from us.

We try to fill our bank accounts with more dollars, more zeroes, and more commas. Yet, it is never enough. It is like trying to fill our jugs with milk, yet our jug has holes in it.

## 5. Why don’t we believe in ourselves?

We are trying to find wisdom in a bottle of Vodka. We are trying to find love through a digital screen. We are trying to find meaning in life through the end of a blunt.

We have great dreams, great passions, and ideas in life. Yet, we are scared. We are beaten down to submission by our parents, our teachers, our bosses, and the entire society. Nobody believes in us.

We want to start our own companies, yet everyone tells us why it will fail.

We want to do something ridiculous and awesome, yet everyone tells us that we aren’t being practical.

We are afraid of being judged, of failing, and of disappointing others— and of ourselves.

## 6. Take the first step

But I say, disregard all of that. No more negativity. No more living in the past. No more excuses.

Let us just do it.

Just fucking do it.

Whatever we want that doesn’t hurt anybody else— let us do something virtuous, wholesome, and helpful to others.

Let us pour our hearts and souls into the words that we write. Let us capture emotions, souls, and beautiful fleeting moments in our viewfinders. Let us dance with our bodies, like we were writing cursive with a pen.

Let us disregard what the rest of the world thinks of us. Let us dance, love, and be merry.

Let us seek to be more creative, more artistic, and child-like everyday.

Let us take a forward step to fulfilling our dreams.

## 7. How to make your dreams come true

Do we want to be a full-time photographer? Let us text a friend who is getting married, and offer to shoot their wedding for free. To make our portfolio. Make your own website via bluehost.com and use wordpress.org. Pay for the ‘genesis’ theme, and announce that you are accepting new clients.

If you want to be a novelist, write your chapter, and publish it to your blog or social media page. Build up a following, that will become hungry for the next chapter.

If you want to become a full-time ‘YouTuber’ — just make a YouTube page, and start recording on your smartphone or your webcam, and start uploading videos. Just publish one video a day, for a year. See where it takes you.

Your dream to be a full-time blogger? Start blogging. Everyday. Several times a day. A lot of bloggers fail trying to blog everyday. I say fuck that, take it to the next level. Try to publish 3 blog posts a day. They don’t need to be great. But just get in the practice of publishing, and not having feared of being negatively judged. And turn off your statistics, your success cannot be measured in page views.

## 8. If you care, share

Keep sharing your beautiful ideas. With others. Don’t be afraid of being judged. It is better to be judged than to be ignored (Seth Godin).

If you were camping, and you had a flashlight, and your friend was wandering around in darkness, wouldn’t you share your light with your friend?

That flashlight is your gift. Your passion. The reason you were put on earth.

Don’t delay. Share your light today.

Be strong,

Eric

Amsterdam - A'DAM Toren und EYE Filmmuseum

Looming tall over the Amsterdam North skyline, this landmark 22-floor tower is home to a selection of bars, restaurants and a rooftop observation deck with stunning views across Amsterdam.

The tower

It may look brand new, but this landmark tower was actually opened in 1971, when it was home to oil company Royal Dutch Shell. Following a multi-million euro refit, the A’DAM Tower was born in early 2016 as one of Amsterdam’s most exciting nightlife and creative hubs. Tower of many talents, A’DAM is home to a rooftop observation deck, a swish boutique hotel, a nightclub and a selection of top-notch bars and eateries - including a revolving restaurant on the 19th floor. Find out more about the following venues at A'DAM Tower:

Creative hub

Sandwiched between the tower’s many attractions are the cutting edge offices of music companies ID&T, MassiveMusic and Gibson, as well as a selection of young, creative Amsterdam companies - making A’DAM a dynamic hub where creativity can flourish.

Nightlife and entertainment at A'DAM Tower

A'DAM Lookout

MADAM restaurant and bar

Sir Adam Hotel

Moon revolving restaurant

Shelter nightclub

(iamsterdam.com)

Eye Filmmuseum is a film archive, museum, and cinema in Amsterdam that preserves and presents both Dutch and foreign films screened in the Netherlands.

Location and history

Eye Filmmuseum is located in the Overhoeks neighborhood of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Its predecessor was the Dutch Historical Film Archive, founded in 1946 by David van Staveren, Felix Halverstad, and directors of Filmtheater Kriterion Piet Meerburg and Paul Kijzer. Following the accession of the archives of the Filmtheater de Uitkijk, the archive was renamed the Netherlands Filmmuseum under the leadership of its first director, film collector Jan de Vaal. The Filmmuseum was located in Kriterion and Stedelijk Museum until 1975, when de Vaal succeeded in acquiring a discrete space for the Filmmuseum in the Vondelpark Pavilion. In 2009, Nederlands Filmmuseum merged with Holland Film, the Netherlands Institute for Film Education and the Filmbank and plans were announced for a new home on the north bank of Amsterdam's waterfront. The Filmmuseum was renamed the Eye Film Institute Netherlands and was officially opened on April 4, 2012, by Queen Beatrix.

Buildings

Eye Filmmuseum

The Eye Filmmuseum building is designed by Delugan Meissl Associated Architects, whose other projects include the Porsche Museum in Stuttgart. The building features two gallery exhibition spaces, one 300-seat cinema, two 127-seat cinemas, and a fourth intimate cinema of about 67 seats. One of the gallery spaces is devoted to a permanent exhibition on the technical and aesthetic histories of cinema. The exhibit includes historical equipment drawn from the Museum's collection of approximately 1,500 cinematic apparatuses, as well as an immersive presentation of about one hundred film clips from the Museum's archive, including Dutch and international films dating from the silent era and beyond. The second gallery space is dedicated to experimental cinema or expanded cinema, a commitment which dates back to the Filmmuseum's founding and the weekly screenings it organized at the Stedelijk Museum in the 1950s under the emerging aegis of cinema as a "seventh art."[ Past exhibitions in this space have focused on auteurs and cinematographers, as well as video artists and visual artists like Ryoji Ikeda and Anthony McCall.

Eye Collection Center

In 2016, Eye opened its new Collection Center, designed by cepezed. The collection is made up of analog, digitized, and born-digital materials which are situated beside a sound restoration and digitization studio, a digital image restoration studio, and a grading and scanning suite. The collection includes 210,000 cans of acetate film, 57,000 film titles, 2.5 petabytes of digital data, 82,000 posters, 700,000 photographs, 27,000 books, 2,000 journals, 1,500 pre-cinema and film apparatuses, 4,500 magic lantern slides, 7,000 musical scores, and 250,000 press cuttings.

The collection originally consisted of films from the Uitkijk archive, compiled by members of the Dutch Filmliga (1927–1933).[12] After joining the International Federation of Film archives (FIAF) in 1947, the Filmmuseum started to actively collect and preserve Dutch film productions. Since then, a number of significant collections have been acquired, ranging from Dutch distributors (Desmet, Centra, and UIP); filmmakers (Joris Ivens, Johan van der Keuken, and Louis van Gasteren); and producers (Matthijs van Heijningen and Kees Kasander) to institutions and organizations, such as the Netherlands Film Academy; the Netherlands Film Fund; and the Netherlands Institute for Animation Film (NIAf). The collection also includes many seminal silent film works, Hollywood classics, international arthouse productions, and independent filmmakers of international renown.

Nitrate Bunkers

Eye stores 30,000 cans of flammable nitrate film in bunkers near the coast of North Holland in Overveen, Castricum and Heemskerk. These nitrate films date between 1896 and the mid-1950s and include a unique collection of 68mm film. Two of these bunkers were built during the Second World War to protect Dutch art museum holdings from theft and destruction; Rembrandt's The Night Watch was among a few of the paintings which were stored in the Castricum bunker for part of the war.

Restorations

Recent silent film Eye restorations include the formerly lost film Beyond the Rocks (1922) starring Gloria Swanson, J'accuse! (1919) by Abel Gance, The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928) by Germain Dulac, Raskolnikov (1923) by Robert Wiene, Flower of Evil (1915) by Carmine Gallone, and Shoes (1916) by Lois Weber.

Restorations of Dutch films include Wan Pipel (1976) by Dutch-Surinamese director Pim de la Parra, Zeemansvrouwen (1930) by Henk Kleinmann, Karakter (1997) by Mike van Diem, Spetters (1980) by Paul Verhoeven, and Abel (1986) by Alex van Warmerdam.

Other restorations include Eve (1962) by Joseph Losey, M (1931) by Fritz Lang, and We Can't Go Home Again (1979) by Nicholas Ray.

Projects

Eye is performing a major film digitization and preservation project together with IBM and Thought Equity Motion, a provider of video platform and rights development services. The project involves scanning and storing more than 150 million discrete DPX files on LTO Gen5 Tape in the Linear Tape File System format.

The institute's youth platform is named MovieZone (previously MovieSquad).

Annual events

International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (November)

Eye International Conference (May)

(Wikipedia)

Das EYE Filmmuseum (früher Nederlands Filmmuseum) in Amsterdam ist das nationale Filmmuseum der Niederlande.

Geschichte

Das Museum wurde 1946 als Nederlands Historisch Filmarchief gegründet und besteht seit 1952 unter seinem heutigen Namen. Seit 1972 befand sich das Filmmuseum in einem Pavillon im Amsterdamer Vondelpark. Der Vondelparkpaviljoen wurde 1874 bis 1881 nach Plänen von Willem Hamer jr. im Stil der Neorenaissance errichtet.

Das Filmmuseum verfügt über etwa 46.000 Filme (davon 7 Millionen Meter Zelluloidfilm aus der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts), mehr als 35.000 Filmplakate und rund 450.000 Fotografien. Selbstgesetztes Ziel des Museums ist die Bewahrung des filmgeschichtlichen Erbes und ebenso die Erhaltung einer lebendigen Filmkultur in den Niederlanden. Daher handelt es sich beim Bestand vor allem um niederländische Produktionen, aber auch ausländische Filme, die in niederländischen Kinos gelaufen sind. Das Museum hat zwei Filmvorführsäle und wird jährlich von mehr als 150.000 Besuchern frequentiert. Es führt auch Restaurierungen durch. Der Institution angeschlossen ist die größte niederländische Bibliothek für Filmliteratur. Im Keller des Museums ist ein Café-Restaurant untergebracht. 1991 wurde das Gebäude umfassend renoviert.

Am 5. April 2012 zog das Amsterdamer Filmmuseum in einen Neubau auf das Overhoeks genannte, ehemals dem niederländischen Ölkonzerns Shell gehörende Gelände am Nordufer der IJ, zu Füßen des Shell-Towers, um. Als Sieger aus dem ausgeschriebenen internationalen Gestaltungswettbewerb ging 2005 der Entwurf des österreichischen Architekturbüros Delugan Meissl Associated Architects hervor. Nach dem Umzug trägt das Museum den Namen EYE. Filmmuseum.

(Wikipedia)

Love doing this to my stories!

maybe this is how Flickr works...

I could spend hours documenting and linking to other images on this trip...

Flickr is the worlds most used relational database with hyperlinks everywhere amongst its 100 million members!

Just how huge is the scale? Monstrously huge. We have more than 100 million accounts. We store, render, and serve tens of billions of photos. Our storage footprint alone is hundreds of petabytes (that’s hundreds of millions of gigabytes). We have hundreds of databases. The list goes on - all the numbers are enormous. They’re so big that we’re often literally hitting the limits of physics, such as the speed of light and the rotational speed of disks, as we try to move faster.

Flickr is a very large platform built out of a number of smaller internal services. Together, those services deliver the Flickr experience you know and love. I’m happy to report that a number of services have already moved to our new infrastructure 100%, and more will finish in the next few weeks and months. Each time a service moves, the error rate drops dramatically and the performance jumps. Fewer Pandas are seen.

see www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/72157707090281734/

See more history here..

www.britannica.com/topic/Flickrcom

Flickr, photo-sharing Web site owned by SmugMug and headquartered in San Francisco, California.

Flickr is an ad-supported service, free to the general public, that allows users to upload digital photographs from their own computers and share them online with either private groups or the world at large. In the early 2000s it won a fast-growing contingent of enthusiasts on the strength of its many social-networking features, most significantly the ability for users to discuss photographs online.

The service began as a peripheral feature in an online electronic game being developed by the Canadian software company Ludicorp. Company founders (and spouses) Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake ultimately abandoned the game and debuted Flickr by itself in 2004. Its key early innovation was the use of “free tagging,” a feature that enabled users to associate metadata tags—searchable keywords—of their own devising with any photographs they viewed, thus creating a large network of associations and allowing users around the world to discover each other’s work. By developing an unregulated but expansive “folksonomy,” Flickr spared itself the prohibitive cost of centrally creating links and groupings.

In March 2005 Flickr was purchased by the Internet giant Yahoo! and relocated to California. Under the Yahoo! banner, Flickr became a dominant photo-sharing service, increasing its roster of registered users from 250,000 to more than 2,000,000 in less than a year. The site continued rolling out new features, including copyright management, an interactive map of photographed locations, and customizable print products. In June 2008 Butterfield and Fake left Yahoo!, and Flickr continued to expand. In July 2008 Getty Images, one of the world’s largest photographic agencies, announced a plan to begin inviting selected Flickr members to participate in one of its commercial photo groups. Flickr was supplanted as the dominant photo-sharing service by social media companies such as Facebook and Instagram, and it also faced competition from other services that offered inexpensive online data storage. In 2017 the American telecommunications company Verizon Communications acquired Yahoo! and reorganized it into a subsidiary, Oath, and the next year SmugMug acquired Flickr from Oath.

All the Hard Quiz tags and names moved to the comment below.. 07-09-24

It's actually a shipping container packed with computers and about 5 petabytes of storage. The Bing Map team processes its maps and redestributes them to other datacenters using this datacenter.

Driven To (Customer) Success .... And Airport, After Big Time Fun In Big D & Great Meetings - IMRAN™

My Karachi childhood friends of 50 years, and I, did our annual reunion, which, like every other time in the last 16 years, consisted of travel, lots of food, tourism, lots of food, museums, lots of food, outdoor activities, and even more heavy dining (to mix it up from just lots of food! 😄). Mix that with 5-8 miles of walking in Dallas and Fort Worth, and you can imagine how sleepy and stuffed we all felt.

As Mohsin, who lives in Dallas, drove Ian and Oscar to the airport, they dropped me off to start a long, technical, exciting and interesting day of client meetings, involving business & tech strategy for crunching, moving, and analyzing almost 1 PetaBytes of data for a legendary financial services organization. Thankfully I was alert throughout the day of meetings - and no one fell asleep when I was talking. 😊

When the senior leader of the client walked out of their office with me, he asked how I would get to the airport. I casually said I had a ride. It was so funny when we walked out and saw that, unbeknownst to me, my ride was a gorgeous Rolls Royce Ghost.

I was delighted to see my dear cousin Raja had found a way to come see me and drive me to the airport. He got out of the car to hug me as I said goodbye to the awesome executive client. But my cousin’s great choice of vehicle and my happening to casually say I had a ride waiting made for an interesting and slightly humorous moment with the client. 😄

© 2019 IMRAN™

From the Monsanto Innovation Forum today:

“To support humanity’s needs, we will have to grow more crops in the next fifty years than in the past 10,000 years combined.”

How?

“In 2030, unattended vehicles will do most of the work, driven by imagery and remote sensing, with new inputs like x-rays of root growth under ground.”

“Corn has doubled its yield twice in history. The first came from the mechanization of farming. Then the move from 75 to 150 bushels/acre came from a new age in the science of seeds and fertility. Both of these advances were on an average basis, with one improved crop for all conditions. The average solution loses a lost of potential value, and the next doubling to 300 bushels/acre will take a systems approach for micro-specialization.”

This all makes sense to me, but I have to take issue with one detail on the 2030 vision — I doubt they will be using a Blackberry phone. =)

Monsanto is the largest seed company and the largest gene sequencer on Earth. They turn over their entire seed product line every three years.

In their molecular breeding program, they sample and sequence each individual corn kernel to detect variation across the cob, with a fleet of ten automated machines, each of which can chip one seed/second to look for 10-100 genetic markers per seed. They test the seeds at 7 million plots at 500 sites in 50 countries. In 2012, they moved from daily data collection to every two hours. It becomes a big data problem. They went from 3 to 8 Petabytes of data in 2012.

This year they will introduce drought-tolerant seeds with a transgene from bacteria. The product has been in development for 12 years with a combination of breeding, biotech and agronomics.

They also have had recent success with spraying naked RNAi (a computer-designed gene silencing technology) on crops to attack beetles and herbicide-resistant weeds. The biologics program is also working on the downstream health of bees.

In March, Monsanto will introduce Field Scripts which takes satellite imagery and soil variation data to drive variable rate planters so planting density and depth will be optimized (e.g., you want plant less densely in poor soil and deeper in times of drought). In their 2012 test, they saw a 5-10 bushel/acre benefit from this optimization algorithm, which would translate to $3-6B of value for the U.S. corn market alone.

They currently use UAVs to count stalks and monitor their health plant-by-plant on their research fields. They are the future of farm equipment as well. “Small autonomous vehicles are a win win. The current oversized combines compacts the soil which reduces yield.”

“Agriculture is set to undergo a series of dramatic changes as IT/Big Data intersects with Robotics, Novel Sensors and Life Science innovations.”

Edited Event Horizon Telescope image of a black hole in the the galaxy M87. What you see here isn't the actual black hole but material tat has been heated to super-hot temperatures and glows as a result of being so close to the black hole and rubbing against other particles. Larger image to follow. Color/processing variant.

Image source: eventhorizontelescope.org/

First original caption: Scientists have obtained the first image of a black hole, using Event Horizon Telescope observations of the center of the galaxy M87. The image shows a bright ring formed as light bends in the intense gravity around a black hole that is 6.5 billion times more massive than the Sun. This long-sought image provides the strongest evidence to date for the existence of supermassive black holes and opens a new window onto the study of black holes, their event horizons, and gravity. Credit: Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration

Second original caption: Astronomers Capture First Image of a Black Hole

An international collaboration presents paradigm-shifting observations of the gargantuan black hole at the heart of distant galaxy Messier 87

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) — a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes forged through international collaboration — was designed to capture images of a black hole. Today, in coordinated press conferences across the globe, EHT researchers reveal that they have succeeded, unveiling the first direct visual evidence of a supermassive black hole and its shadow.

This breakthrough was announced today in a series of six papers published in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The image reveals the black hole at the center of Messier 87 [1], a massive galaxy in the nearby Virgo galaxy cluster. This black hole resides 55 million light-years from Earth and has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the Sun [2].

The EHT links telescopes around the globe to form an Earth-sized virtual telescope with unprecedented sensitivity and resolution [3]. The EHT is the result of years of international collaboration, and offers scientists a new way to study the most extreme objects in the Universe predicted by Einstein’s general relativity during the centennial year of the historic experiment that first confirmed the theory [4].

"We have taken the first picture of a black hole," said EHT project director Sheperd S. Doeleman of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. "This is an extraordinary scientific feat accomplished by a team of more than 200 researchers."

Black holes are extraordinary cosmic objects with enormous masses but extremely compact sizes. The presence of these objects affects their environment in extreme ways, warping spacetime and super-heating any surrounding material.

"If immersed in a bright region, like a disc of glowing gas, we expect a black hole to create a dark region similar to a shadow — something predicted by Einstein’s general relativity that we’ve never seen before, explained chair of the EHT Science Council Heino Falcke of Radboud University, the Netherlands. "This shadow, caused by the gravitational bending and capture of light by the event horizon, reveals a lot about the nature of these fascinating objects and allowed us to measure the enormous mass of M87’s black hole."

Multiple calibration and imaging methods have revealed a ring-like structure with a dark central region — the black hole’s shadow — that persisted over multiple independent EHT observations.

"Once we were sure we had imaged the shadow, we could compare our observations to extensive computer models that include the physics of warped space, superheated matter and strong magnetic fields. Many of the features of the observed image match our theoretical understanding surprisingly well," remarks Paul T.P. Ho, EHT Board member and Director of the East Asian Observatory [5]. "This makes us confident about the interpretation of our observations, including our estimation of the black hole’s mass."

Creating the EHT was a formidable challenge which required upgrading and connecting a worldwide network of eight pre-existing telescopes deployed at a variety of challenging high-altitude sites. These locations included volcanoes in Hawai`i and Mexico, mountains in Arizona and the Spanish Sierra Nevada, the Chilean Atacama Desert, and Antarctica.

The EHT observations use a technique called very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI) which synchronises telescope facilities around the world and exploits the rotation of our planet to form one huge, Earth-size telescope observing at a wavelength of 1.3 mm. VLBI allows the EHT to achieve an angular resolution of 20 micro-arcseconds — enough to read a newspaper in New York from a sidewalk café in Paris [6].

The telescopes contributing to this result were ALMA, APEX, the IRAM 30-meter telescope, the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, the Large Millimeter Telescope Alfonso Serrano, the Submillimeter Array, the Submillimeter Telescope, and the South Pole Telescope [7]. Petabytes of raw data from the telescopes were combined by highly specialised supercomputers hosted by the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy and MIT Haystack Observatory.

The construction of the EHT and the observations announced today represent the culmination of decades of observational, technical, and theoretical work. This example of global teamwork required close collaboration by researchers from around the world. Thirteen partner institutions worked together to create the EHT, using both pre-existing infrastructure and support from a variety of agencies. Key funding was provided by the US National Science Foundation (NSF), the EU's European Research Council (ERC), and funding agencies in East Asia.

"We have achieved something presumed to be impossible just a generation ago," concluded Doeleman. "Breakthroughs in technology, connections between the world's best radio observatories, and innovative algorithms all came together to open an entirely new window on black holes and the event horizon."

Notes

[1] The shadow of a black hole is the closest we can come to an image of the black hole itself, a completely dark object from which light cannot escape. The black hole’s boundary — the event horizon from which the EHT takes its name — is around 2.5 times smaller than the shadow it casts and measures just under 40 billion km across.

[2] Supermassive black holes are relatively tiny astronomical objects — which has made them impossible to directly observe until now. As a black hole’s size is proportional to its mass, the more massive a black hole, the larger the shadow. Thanks to its enormous mass and relative proximity, M87’s black hole was predicted to be one of the largest viewable from Earth — making it a perfect target for the EHT.

[3] Although the telescopes are not physically connected, they are able to synchronize their recorded data with atomic clocks — hydrogen masers — which precisely time their observations. These observations were collected at a wavelength of 1.3 mm during a 2017 global campaign. Each telescope of the EHT produced enormous amounts of data — roughly 350 terabytes per day — which was stored on high-performance helium-filled hard drives. These data were flown to highly specialised supercomputers — known as correlators — at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy and MIT Haystack Observatory to be combined. They were then painstakingly converted into an image using novel computational tools developed by the collaboration.

[4] 100 years ago, two expeditions set out for the island of Príncipe off the coast of Africa and Sobra in Brazil to observe the 1919 solar eclipse, with the goal of testing general relativity by seeing if starlight would be bent around the limb of the sun, as predicted by Einstein. In an echo of those observations, the EHT has sent team members to some of the world's highest and isolated radio facilities to once again test our understanding of gravity.

[5] The East Asian Observatory (EAO) partner on the EHT project represents the participation of many regions in Asia, including China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, India and Indonesia.

[6] Future EHT observations will see substantially increased sensitivity with the participation of the IRAM NOEMA Observatory, the Greenland Telescope and the Kitt Peak Telescope.

[7] ALMA is a partnership of the European Southern Observatory (ESO; Europe, representing its member states), the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), and the National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS) of Japan, together with the National Research Council (Canada), the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST; Taiwan), Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics (ASIAA; Taiwan), and Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI; Republic of Korea), in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. APEX is operated by ESO, the 30-meter telescope is operated by IRAM (the IRAM Partner Organizations are MPG (Germany), CNRS (France) and IGN (Spain)), the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope is operated by the EAO, the Large Millimeter Telescope Alfonso Serrano is operated by INAOE and UMass, the Submillimeter Array is operated by SAO and ASIAA and the Submillimeter Telescope is operated by the Arizona Radio Observatory (ARO). The South Pole Telescope is operated by the University of Chicago with specialized EHT instrumentation provided by the University of Arizona.

More Information

This research was presented in a series of six papers published today in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters, along with a Focus Issue:

Paper I: The Shadow of the Supermassive Black Hole

Paper II: Array and Instrumentation

Paper III: Data processing and Calibration

Paper IV: Imaging the Central Supermassive Black Hole

Paper V: Physical Origin of the Asymmetric Ring

Paper VI: The Shadow and Mass of the Central Black Hole

Press release images in higher resolution (4000x2330 pixels) can be found here in PNG (16-bit), and JPG (8-bit) format. The highest-quality image (7416x4320 pixels, TIF, 16-bit, 180 Mb) can be obtained from repositories of our partners, NSF and ESO. A summary of latest press and media resources can be found on this page.

The EHT collaboration involves more than 200 researchers from Africa, Asia, Europe, North and South America. The international collaboration is working to capture the most detailed black hole images ever by creating a virtual Earth-sized telescope. Supported by considerable international investment, the EHT links existing telescopes using novel systems — creating a fundamentally new instrument with the highest angular resolving power that has yet been achieved.

The individual telescopes involved are; ALMA, APEX, the IRAM 30-meter Telescope, the IRAM NOEMA Observatory, the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT), the Large Millimeter Telescope Alfonso Serrano (LMT), the Submillimeter Array (SMA), the Submillimeter Telescope (SMT), the South Pole Telescope (SPT), the Kitt Peak Telescope, and the Greenland Telescope (GLT).

The EHT collaboration consists of 13 stakeholder institutes; the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, the University of Arizona, the University of Chicago, the East Asian Observatory, Goethe-Universitaet Frankfurt, Institut de Radioastronomie Millimétrique, Large Millimeter Telescope, Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, MIT Haystack Observatory, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Radboud University and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.

Contact Information

Sheperd S. Doeleman

EHT Collaboration Director

Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian

60 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138

E-mail: sdoeleman@cfa.harvard.edu

Phone: +1-617-496-7762

Peter D. Edmonds

Public Information Officer

Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian

60 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138

E-mail: pedmonds@cfa.harvard.edu

Phone: +1-617-571-7279

EHT Outreach Working Group

E-mail: ehtelescope@gmail.com

We can even throw torch beams in the lounge now. The evaporative air/con is not filtering out the smoke..

#Australiaburning See fire map.. www.rfs.nsw.gov.au/

also from the BBC..

See the fires via the BBC here..

www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-51338314

"could a climate suit tip the scales?"

l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.canberratimes.com.au/s...

A decade ago, Ross Garnaut's landmark climate change review reported fire seasons would start earlier, end slightly later and generally be more intense.

see image used here...

www.flickr.com/groups/a_personal_viewpoint/discuss/721577...

www.canberratimes.com.au/story/6567568/ross-garnauts-fire...

Speaking of trees, check out the Climate Change chart on a coaster to visualise the climate data in over 100 locations around Australia..

See your region's average monthly temperature, and a graph of the daily temp compared a visualisation of the location's long-term average.

Get your chart or coaster here... gravitron.com.au/climatecoaster/

Seen in my ANUreporter Spring 2018 Vol.49 No.3

An image searching into the ether for Big Data..

**********************************************************************************

Hadoop Tutorial – One of the most searched terms on the internet today. Do you know the reason? It is because Hadoop is the major part or framework of Big Data.

If you don’t know anything about Big Data then you are in major trouble. But don’t worry I have something for you which is completely FREE – 520+ Big Data Tutorials. This free tutorial series will make you a master of Big Data in just few weeks. Also, I have explained a little about Big Data in this blog.

“Hadoop is a technology to store massive datasets on a cluster of cheap machines in a distributed manner”. It was originated by Doug Cutting and Mike Cafarella.

What is Big Data?

Big Data refers to the datasets too large and complex for traditional systems to store and process. The major problems faced by Big Data majorly falls under three Vs. They are volume, velocity, and variety.

Do you know – Every minute we send 204 million emails, generate 1.8 million Facebook likes, send 278 thousand Tweets, and up-load 200,000 photos to Facebook.

Volume: The data is getting generated in order of Tera to petabytes. The largest contributor of data is social media. For instance, Facebook generates 500 TB of data every day. Twitter generates 8TB of data daily.

Variety: Also the data from various sources have varied formats like text, XML, images, audio, video, etc. Hence the Big Data technology should have the capability of performing analytics on a variety of data.

Velocity: Every enterprise has its own requirement of the time frame within which they have process data. Many use cases like credit card fraud detection have only a few seconds to process the data in real-time and detect fraud. Hence there is a need of framework which is capable of high-speed data computations.

What my nephew in Paris looks after

see him on LinkedIn

At the Churchill Club top 10 tech trends debate I disagreed with the propositions that “Cyber Warfare Becomes a Good Thing” and that “US is the Supreme Cyber Security Force in the World and its Primary Force; citizens accept complete observation by the functions of a police state. A devastating electronic attack results in govt. militarization of major gateways and backbones of the Internet.” I have problems with the “goodness” in the first prediction, and while the U.S. may argue that it is the best, I don’t think the trend is toward a sole superpower in cyberspace.

The NSA TAO group that performs the cyber–espionage pulls 2 petabytes per hour from the Internet. The networking infrastructure to support this is staggering. Much of it is distributed among the beige boxes scattered about in plain view, often above ground on urban sidewalks. When President Obama receives his daily intelligence briefing, over 75% of the information comes from government cyberspies. (BusinessWeek)

Cyber-offense may be very different than cyber-defense. Some argue that open disclosure of defense modalities can make them stronger, like open source software. But offensive tactics need to be kept private for them to be effective more than once. This leads to a lack of transparency, even within the chain of command. This leaves open the possibility of rogue actors — or simply bad local judgment — empowered with an ability to hide their activities and continual conditioning that they are “beyond the law” (routinely ignoring the laws of the nations where they operate). We may suspect that rogue hacking is already happening in China, but why should we expect that it wouldn’t naturally arise elsewhere as well?

Since our debate, the Washington Post exposé reported:

“Chinese hackers have compromised the designs of some of America’s most sensitive and advanced weapons systems—including vital parts of the nation’s missile defenses, fighter aircraft and warships… Also compromised were designs for the F/A 18 fighter jet, V-22 Osprey, F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters and the Navy’s new Littoral Combat Ship meant to prowl the coasts.”

And today, a new report from the U.K. Defense Academy, entitled The Global Cyber Game suggests that my mental model may be a bit antiquated.

Shall we play a game?

“When the Internet first appeared, the cultural bias of Western countries was to see it as a wonderful and welcome innovation. The fact that it created security problems somewhat took them by surprise and they have been reluctant to respond.

In contrast, states such as Russia and China saw the Internet as a potential threat from the outset, and looked at the problem in the round from their perspective. They formulated strategy and began to move pre-emptively, which has allowed them to take the initiative and to some extent define the Cyber Game.

As a result, cyberspace is now justifiably seen by Western countries as a new and potentially serious avenue of international attack, which must logically be militarized to protect the nation.

But what if information abundance is so deeply transformative that it is changing not only the old game between nations but the global gameboard itself? In this case, we need a different approach, one that seeks to fully appreciate the new game and gameboard before making recommendations for national security.

The ability of national governments to understand and tame the Global Cyber Game, before it takes on an unwelcome life of its own, may be the crucial test for the effectiveness and even legitimacy of the nation state in the information age.” (p.107)

The China Hypothesis

“It makes extensive state-bankrolled purchases of many critical parts of the local economies and infrastructure under the guise of independent commercial acquisitions. These include contracts for provision of national Internet backbones, and equity stakes in utility companies. These enable it to control ever larger parts of the target economies, to install national-scale wiretaps in domestic networks and, in effect, to place remote off-switches in elements of critical national infrastructure.

Finally, to round off the effort, the ‘competitor’ simultaneously makes a massive effort to build its own domestic knowledge industry, sending students around the world in vast numbers to learn local languages and acquire advanced technical skills. In some cases, these students even manage to obtain funding from the target country educational systems. This effort, which only pays off on long timescales, allows it to consolidate and make full use of the information it has exfiltrated from around the world.

If it is allowed to continue for long enough, the target countries will find that they have lost so much autonomy to the ‘competitor’ country that they are unable to resist a full cultural and economic take-over, which is ultimately accomplished without open hostilities ever being declared, or at least not of a type that would be recognizable as industrial-era conflict.

National geopolitical strategy can be disguised as normal commercial activity and, even if this is noticed, it cannot be challenged within the legal systems of target countries. Thus an international-scale offensive could be mounted without it ever being understood as such.

These difficulties are somewhat reminiscent of the industrial cartelization strategy pursued by Germany in the years running up to the Second World War. This carefully orchestrated form of economic warfare was effectively invisible because it was positioned in the cognitive blind spot of British Empire industrialists. Until war broke out, and the deliberately engineered shortage of materials became apparent, they were unable to see it as anything but apparently profit-seeking industrial strategy on the part of German industry.

What sort of response should be made to a strategy like this... is retaliation of any kind appropriate? Should the Cyber Game be played as a zero-sum game? The essential problem is that the strategy involves IP theft on a grand, indeed global scale. This is real destruction of value for those companies and agencies who have been targeted

Is there any other way of looking at this? Possibly the one thought that trumps Western outrage at the idea of information theft is to recall that it can be stolen without being lost, though it may be devalued. It may not be the knowledge itself but how we create it and use it that is important. In this view, the Cyber Game, being ultimately knowledge-based, is genuinely a non-zero game. Among economic players of the Cyber Game, this understanding is gradually turning into an approach that author Don Tapscott calls ‘radical openness’.

A true knowledge-era strategy may not be stealing information but sharing it, playing the Cyber Game high on the gameboard, as Internet pioneers have been doing all along. Maybe Western democracies should respond to China’s alleged actions in the same way. Dare they choose to reframe in this way?” (pp.52-8.)

The Future

“The most likely form of conflict is now civil war in countries with governments referred to as anocracies, neither fully democratic nor fully autocratic.

Income polarization is rising within wealthy countries, as a side effect of globalization, and is hollowing out the middle class. Commentators and researchers have noted this effect particularly in the US. Whether this rising polarization could raise the risk of civil war in wealthy countries is questionable, as long as their governments remain effective. This itself will be a function of how well they adapt to the evolving information environment. If they fail, and a combination of financial, economic and environmental crises threaten the ability of governments to maintain the quality of life, then internal conflict is entirely possible.” (p.74)

And as I try to look farther to the future, the offensive cyber-code and autonomous agents of today are not so different from the bio and then nano-weapons of tomorrow. The cell is but a vessel for the transmission of code.

I think humanity will cut its teeth on cultural norms and responses (police state, cyber-counter-guerillas (beyond governments to posses and bounty hunters), and a societal immune system for the crazy ones) in response to the imminent cyber threats… and then we will face bio threats… and finally nano threats. So there is little reason to focus on the latter until we have solved the former.

Edited Event Horizon Telescope image of a black hole in the the galaxy M87. What you see here isn't the actual black hole but material tat has been heated to super-hot temperatures and glows as a result of being so close to the black hole and rubbing against other particles. Larger image to follow.

Image source: eventhorizontelescope.org/

First original caption: Scientists have obtained the first image of a black hole, using Event Horizon Telescope observations of the center of the galaxy M87. The image shows a bright ring formed as light bends in the intense gravity around a black hole that is 6.5 billion times more massive than the Sun. This long-sought image provides the strongest evidence to date for the existence of supermassive black holes and opens a new window onto the study of black holes, their event horizons, and gravity. Credit: Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration

Second original caption: Astronomers Capture First Image of a Black Hole

An international collaboration presents paradigm-shifting observations of the gargantuan black hole at the heart of distant galaxy Messier 87

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) — a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes forged through international collaboration — was designed to capture images of a black hole. Today, in coordinated press conferences across the globe, EHT researchers reveal that they have succeeded, unveiling the first direct visual evidence of a supermassive black hole and its shadow.

This breakthrough was announced today in a series of six papers published in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The image reveals the black hole at the center of Messier 87 [1], a massive galaxy in the nearby Virgo galaxy cluster. This black hole resides 55 million light-years from Earth and has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the Sun [2].

The EHT links telescopes around the globe to form an Earth-sized virtual telescope with unprecedented sensitivity and resolution [3]. The EHT is the result of years of international collaboration, and offers scientists a new way to study the most extreme objects in the Universe predicted by Einstein’s general relativity during the centennial year of the historic experiment that first confirmed the theory [4].

"We have taken the first picture of a black hole," said EHT project director Sheperd S. Doeleman of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. "This is an extraordinary scientific feat accomplished by a team of more than 200 researchers."

Black holes are extraordinary cosmic objects with enormous masses but extremely compact sizes. The presence of these objects affects their environment in extreme ways, warping spacetime and super-heating any surrounding material.

"If immersed in a bright region, like a disc of glowing gas, we expect a black hole to create a dark region similar to a shadow — something predicted by Einstein’s general relativity that we’ve never seen before, explained chair of the EHT Science Council Heino Falcke of Radboud University, the Netherlands. "This shadow, caused by the gravitational bending and capture of light by the event horizon, reveals a lot about the nature of these fascinating objects and allowed us to measure the enormous mass of M87’s black hole."

Multiple calibration and imaging methods have revealed a ring-like structure with a dark central region — the black hole’s shadow — that persisted over multiple independent EHT observations.

"Once we were sure we had imaged the shadow, we could compare our observations to extensive computer models that include the physics of warped space, superheated matter and strong magnetic fields. Many of the features of the observed image match our theoretical understanding surprisingly well," remarks Paul T.P. Ho, EHT Board member and Director of the East Asian Observatory [5]. "This makes us confident about the interpretation of our observations, including our estimation of the black hole’s mass."

Creating the EHT was a formidable challenge which required upgrading and connecting a worldwide network of eight pre-existing telescopes deployed at a variety of challenging high-altitude sites. These locations included volcanoes in Hawai`i and Mexico, mountains in Arizona and the Spanish Sierra Nevada, the Chilean Atacama Desert, and Antarctica.

The EHT observations use a technique called very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI) which synchronises telescope facilities around the world and exploits the rotation of our planet to form one huge, Earth-size telescope observing at a wavelength of 1.3 mm. VLBI allows the EHT to achieve an angular resolution of 20 micro-arcseconds — enough to read a newspaper in New York from a sidewalk café in Paris [6].

The telescopes contributing to this result were ALMA, APEX, the IRAM 30-meter telescope, the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, the Large Millimeter Telescope Alfonso Serrano, the Submillimeter Array, the Submillimeter Telescope, and the South Pole Telescope [7]. Petabytes of raw data from the telescopes were combined by highly specialised supercomputers hosted by the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy and MIT Haystack Observatory.

The construction of the EHT and the observations announced today represent the culmination of decades of observational, technical, and theoretical work. This example of global teamwork required close collaboration by researchers from around the world. Thirteen partner institutions worked together to create the EHT, using both pre-existing infrastructure and support from a variety of agencies. Key funding was provided by the US National Science Foundation (NSF), the EU's European Research Council (ERC), and funding agencies in East Asia.

"We have achieved something presumed to be impossible just a generation ago," concluded Doeleman. "Breakthroughs in technology, connections between the world's best radio observatories, and innovative algorithms all came together to open an entirely new window on black holes and the event horizon."

Notes

[1] The shadow of a black hole is the closest we can come to an image of the black hole itself, a completely dark object from which light cannot escape. The black hole’s boundary — the event horizon from which the EHT takes its name — is around 2.5 times smaller than the shadow it casts and measures just under 40 billion km across.

[2] Supermassive black holes are relatively tiny astronomical objects — which has made them impossible to directly observe until now. As a black hole’s size is proportional to its mass, the more massive a black hole, the larger the shadow. Thanks to its enormous mass and relative proximity, M87’s black hole was predicted to be one of the largest viewable from Earth — making it a perfect target for the EHT.

[3] Although the telescopes are not physically connected, they are able to synchronize their recorded data with atomic clocks — hydrogen masers — which precisely time their observations. These observations were collected at a wavelength of 1.3 mm during a 2017 global campaign. Each telescope of the EHT produced enormous amounts of data — roughly 350 terabytes per day — which was stored on high-performance helium-filled hard drives. These data were flown to highly specialised supercomputers — known as correlators — at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy and MIT Haystack Observatory to be combined. They were then painstakingly converted into an image using novel computational tools developed by the collaboration.

[4] 100 years ago, two expeditions set out for the island of Príncipe off the coast of Africa and Sobra in Brazil to observe the 1919 solar eclipse, with the goal of testing general relativity by seeing if starlight would be bent around the limb of the sun, as predicted by Einstein. In an echo of those observations, the EHT has sent team members to some of the world's highest and isolated radio facilities to once again test our understanding of gravity.

[5] The East Asian Observatory (EAO) partner on the EHT project represents the participation of many regions in Asia, including China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, India and Indonesia.

[6] Future EHT observations will see substantially increased sensitivity with the participation of the IRAM NOEMA Observatory, the Greenland Telescope and the Kitt Peak Telescope.

[7] ALMA is a partnership of the European Southern Observatory (ESO; Europe, representing its member states), the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), and the National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS) of Japan, together with the National Research Council (Canada), the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST; Taiwan), Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics (ASIAA; Taiwan), and Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI; Republic of Korea), in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. APEX is operated by ESO, the 30-meter telescope is operated by IRAM (the IRAM Partner Organizations are MPG (Germany), CNRS (France) and IGN (Spain)), the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope is operated by the EAO, the Large Millimeter Telescope Alfonso Serrano is operated by INAOE and UMass, the Submillimeter Array is operated by SAO and ASIAA and the Submillimeter Telescope is operated by the Arizona Radio Observatory (ARO). The South Pole Telescope is operated by the University of Chicago with specialized EHT instrumentation provided by the University of Arizona.

More Information

This research was presented in a series of six papers published today in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters, along with a Focus Issue:

Paper I: The Shadow of the Supermassive Black Hole

Paper II: Array and Instrumentation

Paper III: Data processing and Calibration

Paper IV: Imaging the Central Supermassive Black Hole

Paper V: Physical Origin of the Asymmetric Ring

Paper VI: The Shadow and Mass of the Central Black Hole

Press release images in higher resolution (4000x2330 pixels) can be found here in PNG (16-bit), and JPG (8-bit) format. The highest-quality image (7416x4320 pixels, TIF, 16-bit, 180 Mb) can be obtained from repositories of our partners, NSF and ESO. A summary of latest press and media resources can be found on this page.

The EHT collaboration involves more than 200 researchers from Africa, Asia, Europe, North and South America. The international collaboration is working to capture the most detailed black hole images ever by creating a virtual Earth-sized telescope. Supported by considerable international investment, the EHT links existing telescopes using novel systems — creating a fundamentally new instrument with the highest angular resolving power that has yet been achieved.

The individual telescopes involved are; ALMA, APEX, the IRAM 30-meter Telescope, the IRAM NOEMA Observatory, the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT), the Large Millimeter Telescope Alfonso Serrano (LMT), the Submillimeter Array (SMA), the Submillimeter Telescope (SMT), the South Pole Telescope (SPT), the Kitt Peak Telescope, and the Greenland Telescope (GLT).

The EHT collaboration consists of 13 stakeholder institutes; the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, the University of Arizona, the University of Chicago, the East Asian Observatory, Goethe-Universitaet Frankfurt, Institut de Radioastronomie Millimétrique, Large Millimeter Telescope, Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, MIT Haystack Observatory, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Radboud University and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.

Contact Information

Sheperd S. Doeleman

EHT Collaboration Director

Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian

60 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138

E-mail: sdoeleman@cfa.harvard.edu

Phone: +1-617-496-7762

Peter D. Edmonds

Public Information Officer

Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian

60 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138

E-mail: pedmonds@cfa.harvard.edu

Phone: +1-617-571-7279

EHT Outreach Working Group

E-mail: ehtelescope@gmail.com

CMS utilizes a distributed infrastructure of computing centers to provide access to data stored on disk only at Tier-2 centers and tape with disk caches at Tier-1 centers. Attached are CPU resources for organized processing and analysis. Data is organized in datasets which consist of files grouped in blocks for performance reasons. CMS uses it's data transfer system PhEDEx, to transfer datasets from site to site and its data bookkeeping service DBS to track location and metadata. Integrated over the whole system, even in the first year of data taking, the available disk storage approaches 10 petabytes of space. Maintaining consistency between the data bookkeeping service, the data transfer system, and physical storage is an important operational task which guarantees uninterrupted data availability.

iopscience.iop.org/1742-6596/219/7/072050

The San Francisco location of the Internet Archive sits at 300 Funston St., at the site of a former Christian Science church. Rumor has it that they bought it, in part, because the front of the building matched the already-existing logo.

The Internet Archive has a noble mission: “to give everyone access to all knowledge, forever.” This includes the Live Music Archive (LMA), which is a collection of over 250,000 concert recordings of taper-friendly bands in lossless audio formats.

The servers are cooled with ambient air, and the rest of the building is heated with the captured heat emitted by them (it IS San Francisco after all). The Archive, in total, hosts 180 petabytes of data, worldwide, with 15 petabytes residing in this location.

1 petabyte = 1024 terabytes or 1024x1024 gigabytes (or approximately 5.289e+17 bytes).

===================================================

In 2025, the IA’s mission has included saving Federal webpages from the purge of The Lyin’ King’s war on the Truth. This includes thousands of of pages from the CDC, National Parks and other institutions that contained any whiff of diversity, mentioning contributions by women, queer folk and people of color, mentions of slavery or our genocide against This Continent’s original inhabitants.

“Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.

Petabytes allow us to say: "Correlation is enough." We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot”

Chris Anderson | Wired | The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete

www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_theory/

Background CC image courtesy of www.flickr.com/photos/visualpanic/2422742902/. This citation appears in the bottom right.

Edited Event Horizon Telescope image of a black hole in the the galaxy M87. What you see here isn't the actual black hole but material tat has been heated to super-hot temperatures and glows as a result of being so close to the black hole and rubbing against other particles. Larger image to follow. Color/processing variant.

Image source: eventhorizontelescope.org/

First original caption: Scientists have obtained the first image of a black hole, using Event Horizon Telescope observations of the center of the galaxy M87. The image shows a bright ring formed as light bends in the intense gravity around a black hole that is 6.5 billion times more massive than the Sun. This long-sought image provides the strongest evidence to date for the existence of supermassive black holes and opens a new window onto the study of black holes, their event horizons, and gravity. Credit: Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration

Second original caption: Astronomers Capture First Image of a Black Hole

An international collaboration presents paradigm-shifting observations of the gargantuan black hole at the heart of distant galaxy Messier 87

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) — a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes forged through international collaboration — was designed to capture images of a black hole. Today, in coordinated press conferences across the globe, EHT researchers reveal that they have succeeded, unveiling the first direct visual evidence of a supermassive black hole and its shadow.

This breakthrough was announced today in a series of six papers published in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The image reveals the black hole at the center of Messier 87 [1], a massive galaxy in the nearby Virgo galaxy cluster. This black hole resides 55 million light-years from Earth and has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the Sun [2].

The EHT links telescopes around the globe to form an Earth-sized virtual telescope with unprecedented sensitivity and resolution [3]. The EHT is the result of years of international collaboration, and offers scientists a new way to study the most extreme objects in the Universe predicted by Einstein’s general relativity during the centennial year of the historic experiment that first confirmed the theory [4].

"We have taken the first picture of a black hole," said EHT project director Sheperd S. Doeleman of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. "This is an extraordinary scientific feat accomplished by a team of more than 200 researchers."

Black holes are extraordinary cosmic objects with enormous masses but extremely compact sizes. The presence of these objects affects their environment in extreme ways, warping spacetime and super-heating any surrounding material.

"If immersed in a bright region, like a disc of glowing gas, we expect a black hole to create a dark region similar to a shadow — something predicted by Einstein’s general relativity that we’ve never seen before, explained chair of the EHT Science Council Heino Falcke of Radboud University, the Netherlands. "This shadow, caused by the gravitational bending and capture of light by the event horizon, reveals a lot about the nature of these fascinating objects and allowed us to measure the enormous mass of M87’s black hole."

Multiple calibration and imaging methods have revealed a ring-like structure with a dark central region — the black hole’s shadow — that persisted over multiple independent EHT observations.

"Once we were sure we had imaged the shadow, we could compare our observations to extensive computer models that include the physics of warped space, superheated matter and strong magnetic fields. Many of the features of the observed image match our theoretical understanding surprisingly well," remarks Paul T.P. Ho, EHT Board member and Director of the East Asian Observatory [5]. "This makes us confident about the interpretation of our observations, including our estimation of the black hole’s mass."

Creating the EHT was a formidable challenge which required upgrading and connecting a worldwide network of eight pre-existing telescopes deployed at a variety of challenging high-altitude sites. These locations included volcanoes in Hawai`i and Mexico, mountains in Arizona and the Spanish Sierra Nevada, the Chilean Atacama Desert, and Antarctica.

The EHT observations use a technique called very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI) which synchronises telescope facilities around the world and exploits the rotation of our planet to form one huge, Earth-size telescope observing at a wavelength of 1.3 mm. VLBI allows the EHT to achieve an angular resolution of 20 micro-arcseconds — enough to read a newspaper in New York from a sidewalk café in Paris [6].

The telescopes contributing to this result were ALMA, APEX, the IRAM 30-meter telescope, the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, the Large Millimeter Telescope Alfonso Serrano, the Submillimeter Array, the Submillimeter Telescope, and the South Pole Telescope [7]. Petabytes of raw data from the telescopes were combined by highly specialised supercomputers hosted by the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy and MIT Haystack Observatory.

The construction of the EHT and the observations announced today represent the culmination of decades of observational, technical, and theoretical work. This example of global teamwork required close collaboration by researchers from around the world. Thirteen partner institutions worked together to create the EHT, using both pre-existing infrastructure and support from a variety of agencies. Key funding was provided by the US National Science Foundation (NSF), the EU's European Research Council (ERC), and funding agencies in East Asia.

"We have achieved something presumed to be impossible just a generation ago," concluded Doeleman. "Breakthroughs in technology, connections between the world's best radio observatories, and innovative algorithms all came together to open an entirely new window on black holes and the event horizon."

Notes

[1] The shadow of a black hole is the closest we can come to an image of the black hole itself, a completely dark object from which light cannot escape. The black hole’s boundary — the event horizon from which the EHT takes its name — is around 2.5 times smaller than the shadow it casts and measures just under 40 billion km across.

[2] Supermassive black holes are relatively tiny astronomical objects — which has made them impossible to directly observe until now. As a black hole’s size is proportional to its mass, the more massive a black hole, the larger the shadow. Thanks to its enormous mass and relative proximity, M87’s black hole was predicted to be one of the largest viewable from Earth — making it a perfect target for the EHT.

[3] Although the telescopes are not physically connected, they are able to synchronize their recorded data with atomic clocks — hydrogen masers — which precisely time their observations. These observations were collected at a wavelength of 1.3 mm during a 2017 global campaign. Each telescope of the EHT produced enormous amounts of data — roughly 350 terabytes per day — which was stored on high-performance helium-filled hard drives. These data were flown to highly specialised supercomputers — known as correlators — at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy and MIT Haystack Observatory to be combined. They were then painstakingly converted into an image using novel computational tools developed by the collaboration.

[4] 100 years ago, two expeditions set out for the island of Príncipe off the coast of Africa and Sobra in Brazil to observe the 1919 solar eclipse, with the goal of testing general relativity by seeing if starlight would be bent around the limb of the sun, as predicted by Einstein. In an echo of those observations, the EHT has sent team members to some of the world's highest and isolated radio facilities to once again test our understanding of gravity.

[5] The East Asian Observatory (EAO) partner on the EHT project represents the participation of many regions in Asia, including China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, India and Indonesia.

[6] Future EHT observations will see substantially increased sensitivity with the participation of the IRAM NOEMA Observatory, the Greenland Telescope and the Kitt Peak Telescope.

[7] ALMA is a partnership of the European Southern Observatory (ESO; Europe, representing its member states), the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), and the National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS) of Japan, together with the National Research Council (Canada), the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST; Taiwan), Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics (ASIAA; Taiwan), and Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI; Republic of Korea), in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. APEX is operated by ESO, the 30-meter telescope is operated by IRAM (the IRAM Partner Organizations are MPG (Germany), CNRS (France) and IGN (Spain)), the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope is operated by the EAO, the Large Millimeter Telescope Alfonso Serrano is operated by INAOE and UMass, the Submillimeter Array is operated by SAO and ASIAA and the Submillimeter Telescope is operated by the Arizona Radio Observatory (ARO). The South Pole Telescope is operated by the University of Chicago with specialized EHT instrumentation provided by the University of Arizona.

More Information

This research was presented in a series of six papers published today in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters, along with a Focus Issue:

Paper I: The Shadow of the Supermassive Black Hole

Paper II: Array and Instrumentation

Paper III: Data processing and Calibration

Paper IV: Imaging the Central Supermassive Black Hole

Paper V: Physical Origin of the Asymmetric Ring

Paper VI: The Shadow and Mass of the Central Black Hole

Press release images in higher resolution (4000x2330 pixels) can be found here in PNG (16-bit), and JPG (8-bit) format. The highest-quality image (7416x4320 pixels, TIF, 16-bit, 180 Mb) can be obtained from repositories of our partners, NSF and ESO. A summary of latest press and media resources can be found on this page.

The EHT collaboration involves more than 200 researchers from Africa, Asia, Europe, North and South America. The international collaboration is working to capture the most detailed black hole images ever by creating a virtual Earth-sized telescope. Supported by considerable international investment, the EHT links existing telescopes using novel systems — creating a fundamentally new instrument with the highest angular resolving power that has yet been achieved.

The individual telescopes involved are; ALMA, APEX, the IRAM 30-meter Telescope, the IRAM NOEMA Observatory, the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT), the Large Millimeter Telescope Alfonso Serrano (LMT), the Submillimeter Array (SMA), the Submillimeter Telescope (SMT), the South Pole Telescope (SPT), the Kitt Peak Telescope, and the Greenland Telescope (GLT).

The EHT collaboration consists of 13 stakeholder institutes; the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, the University of Arizona, the University of Chicago, the East Asian Observatory, Goethe-Universitaet Frankfurt, Institut de Radioastronomie Millimétrique, Large Millimeter Telescope, Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, MIT Haystack Observatory, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Radboud University and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.

Contact Information

Sheperd S. Doeleman

EHT Collaboration Director

Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian

60 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138

E-mail: sdoeleman@cfa.harvard.edu

Phone: +1-617-496-7762

Peter D. Edmonds

Public Information Officer

Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian

60 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138

E-mail: pedmonds@cfa.harvard.edu

Phone: +1-617-571-7279

EHT Outreach Working Group

E-mail: ehtelescope@gmail.com

Data Products Online (DPO) at NASA Langley’s Atmospheric Science Data Center stores more than 2 petabytes of data and more than 80 million files for missions like the Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System experiment (CERES) and the Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observation satellite (CALIPSO). The data on these specific Green SGI’s are used for internal data analytics. eosweb.larc.nasa.gov

Image credit: NASA LaRC

2000 - The world celebrates the turn of the millenium | The dot-com bubble bursts | Concorde crashes in France, killing 113 | Personal home computers break the 1Ghz barrier | Sydney hosts the Olympic Games

2001 - George Bush is sworn in as the 43rd President of the United States | A devastating terrorist attack leaves nearly 3,000 dead in America | The world's first space tourist | Wikipedia is launched

2002 - Apple introduces the iMac G4 | Quaoar is discovered | The deadliest act of terrorism in the history of Indonesia

2003 - Space Shuttle Columbia disaster | The invasion of Iraq | The Human Genome Project is completed | Record heatwaves kill tens of thousands in Europe | MySpace is launched

2004 - George Bush is re-elected | Athens hosts the Olympic Games | Train bombings in Madrid kill nearly 200 people | Hubble Ultra Deep Field | Mars Exploration Rovers | The first privately funded human spaceflight | Facebook is launched | World's first 1Gb SD card | London's skyline gets a new landmark | Asia gets a new tallest building | Indian Ocean earthquake leaves a quarter of a million dead

2005 - Suicide bombers in London kill 56 people, injure 700 others | Hurricane Katrina floods New Orleans | Huygens probe reveals images of Titan's surface | YouTube is launched | Angela Merkel becomes the first female Chancellor of Germany

2006 - North Korea conducts its first nuclear test | West African black rhinos are declared extinct | Pluto is demoted to "dwarf planet" status | Saddam Hussein is executed

2007 - Global economic downturn | Gordon Brown succeeds Tony Blair as Prime Minister of Great Britain | Nicolas Sarkozy is elected President of the French Republic | Arctic sea ice hits a record low | Apple debuts the iPhone | Amazon releases the Kindle | Benazir Bhutto is assassinated in Pakistan

2008 - Oil prices hit a record high of $147/barrel | Internet continues to boom | Scientists extract images directly from the brain | Artificial DNA | Breakthrough in wireless energy transfer | Major advances in CGI | Video adverts on London's tube | Beijing hosts the Olympic games

2009 - Major breakthrough in cancer research | Scientists engineer new plastics without use of fossil fuels | Mouse genome is fully sequenced | Water is discovered on the Moon | Mercury is 98% mapped | A shift towards portable (and ultra-portable) PCs | Mind control headsets available for gamers | The tallest man-made structure in history is completed | Kepler searches for Earth-like planets | 3D scanning enters the consumer market | Africa's population tops one billion

2010 - Scientists create synthetic life | Iran is on the brink of revolution | China becomes the largest energy consumer in the world | Localised renewable energy is becoming affordable | Apple debuts the iPad | Augmented Reality is entering the mainstream | Macular degeneration is curable | Speech-to-speech translation is common in mobile phones | Major breakthrough in robotics |BP oil spill environmental disaster

2011-2014 - British forces withdraw from Afghanistan

2011 - The Space Shuttle fleet is retired | The web has a greater reach than television | Multi-touch surface computing is available to the mass market | The first open petaflop supercomputer comes online | Batteries that charge in seconds | 22 nanometre chips are in mass production | USB 3.0 is available | Consumer-level robotics are booming | Completion of the ISS | World's first commercial spaceport | China's Three Gorges Dam is fully operational

2012 - Economic growth remains sluggish in many markets | London hosts the Olympic Games |

OLED screens are becoming widespread | Brain-computer interfaces allowing the paralysed to walk again | A cure for baldness | World's first 1-GW offshore wind farm | Mars Science Laboratory explores the Red Planet | Barack Obama is re-elected

2013 - Iran carries out its first nuclear test | Solar flares are disrupting the Earth's magnetosphere |

3D technologies are widespread | India launches its second lunar exploration mission

2014 - The James Webb telescope is launched | Personalised DNA sequencing for less than $100 | Internet "lifecasting" enters the mainstream | 16nm chips are in mass production | Terabyte SD cards are available | Robotic pack mules are entering military service | MAVEN probe arrives at Mars | The Rosetta probe deploys its lander on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko | Most telephone calls are made via the Internet now | Brazil hosts the FIFA World Cup

2015-2019 - Virtual Reality makes a comeback

2015 - Worldwide PC use reaches 2bn | Nanotech water filters are spreading to many developing countries | The first climate change refugees | 3D printing enters the consumer market | New Horizons probe arrives at Pluto | Dawn probe arrives at Ceres | Voyager I enters the heliopause

2016 - The US military withdraws its last remaining troops from Afghanistan | US vehicles are becoming more fuel-efficient | Laser guns are in naval use | Holographic versatile disc (HVD) replaces Blu-Ray | Biocameras matching human eye resolution | Rio de Janeiro hosts the Olympic Games

2017 - Total solar eclipse in the USA | Crossrail opens in London | Electronic paper is widespread | Portable medical lasers that seal wounds | Teleportation of simple molecules

2018 - The European Extremely Large Telescope is operational | Ubiquitous internet nodes connect appliances, vehicles, etc. | Robot insect spies are in military use | Consumer devices with 100 Gbit/s transfer speeds | Anti-fat drug is available | The new World Trade Center is complete

2019 - ITER experimental fusion reactor is switched on | Computers break the exaflop barrier | Bionic eyes are commercially available | Automated freight transport | The Aral Sea disappears from the map | Global oil demand exceeds 100 million barrels per day

2020-2035 - World energy crisis

2020 - Internet use reaches 5 billion worldwide | Texting by thinking | Complete organ replacements grown from stem cells | Holographic TV is mainstream | Sweden becomes the first oil-free country |

Glacier National Park and other regions are becoming ice-free | Completion of the Square Kilometre Array | Wholly lifelike CGI

2021 - "Thoughtcrime" is becoming a reality | Fully reusable single-stage-to-orbit spacecraft | Telecommuting is a standard flexible work option | Traditional microchips are reaching the limits of miniaturisation | Water crisis in southwest USA

2022 - Nanotech clothing enters the mass market | Tooth regeneration is transforming dental care | Piezoelectric nanowires are appearing in high-end products | Deafness is curable

2023 - Laser-driven fusion energy makes progress | Borneo’s rainforests have been wiped from the map | Gorillas are extinct in Central Africa | Turkey becomes self-sufficient in energy production

2024 - The biggest refugee crisis in world history | African elephants are on the brink of extinction | Petabyte storage devices are available

2025 - Human brain simulations are becoming possible | Medical nanobots are becoming available | China's economy continues to boom | Vertical farms are appearing in many cities | High-speed rail networks are being expanded in many countries | Africa and the Middle East are linked by a transcontinental bridge | Progress with longevity extension | Stress and anxiety are reaching crisis levels | Contact with the Voyager probes is lost

2026 - Rising sea levels are wreaking havoc on the Maldives | The United States of Africa is established

2027 - BRICs overtake the G7 nations | Carbon sequestration is underway in many nations

2028 - Printed electronics are ubiquitous | UK population reaches 70m | Manned fighter planes are being phased out and replaced with UAVs | Amputees can regrow lost limbs

2029 - Human-like AI is becoming a reality | Heavy automation of supermarkets and retail environments | Intelligent advertising | Titan Saturn System Mission (TSSM) | Lake Chad disappears from the map

2030 - Global population is reaching crisis point | AI is widespread | USA is declining as a world power | AIDS, cancer and a plethora of other degenerative diseases are curable | India becomes the most populous country in the world | Full weather modeling is perfected | Emerging job titles of today

2031 – Web 4.0 is transforming the Internet landscape | Married couples are a minority

2032 - Manned mission to Mars | 4th generation nuclear power | Terabit internet speeds are commonplace

2033 - Hypersonic airliners are entering service | Holographic wall screens | IT's share of the US economy reaches 15% | Lung disease in China has killed over 80 million by now

2034 - Exabyte storage devices are available

2035 - Turmoil in the Middle East | The Arctic is becoming ice-free during summer | Self-driving vehicles are widespread | Holographic recreations of dead people | Robots are dominating the battlefield | Artificially-grown meat is available to consumers

2036 - Bionic eyes that surpass human vision

2037 - Quantum computers are becoming available

2038 - Teleportation of complex organic molecules | The FIFA World Cup trophy is replaced

2039 - Full immersion virtual reality | Universal translators are ubiquitous | Nanotech fabrics are ubiquitous | Australia's national symbol, the Koala bear, faces extinction | US population reaches 400m

2040 - Clean energy is widespread | Fusion power is nearing commercial availability | "Energy islands" are appearing in many coastal regions | Thought transfer is dominating personal communications worldwide | Claytronics are revolutionising the consumer market | Breakthroughs in carbon nanotube production | World population reaches 8.5 bn | Water crisis in Europe

2042 - Nanotech robot swarms are the latest in military hi-tech | Manned missions to Phobos and Deimos | Floating hotels in the sky are heralding a new era in luxury transport

2044 - The last veterans of WW2 are passing away

2045 - Humans are becoming intimately merged with machines | Global food and water shortages |

Gulf Coast cities are being abandoned due to super hurricanes

2045-2049 - China transitions towards a democracy | Major extinctions of animal and plant life

2048 - The near-Earth asteroid 2007 VK184 makes a close pass

2049 - Robots are a common feature of homes and workplaces |

2050 - The World in 2050 | 45% of the Amazon rainforest has been destroyed | Wildfires have tripled in some regions; air quality and visibility is declining | Smaller, faster, hi-tech automobiles | Continent-wide "supergrids" provide much of the world's energy needs | One in five Europeans is a Muslim

2052 - Hyper-fast crime scene analysis

2053 - Moore's Law reaches stunning new levels | Genetically engineered "designer babies" for the rich

2055 - Traditional media have fragmented and diversified | Global population plateaus at 9 billion

2056 - Fully synthetic humans are becoming technically feasible

2057 - Computers reach another milestone | Handheld MRI scanners

2058 - Construction of a radio telescope on the Moon

2059 - Mars population reaches 100

2060 - Global mass migrations of refugees | Flood barriers erected in New York | Global extinction rates are peaking | An ageing population | Mining operations on the Moon

2061 - Halley's Comet returns | UK population reaches 80 million

2062 - Nanofabricators enter the consumer market

2064 - IT's share of the US economy reaches 20%

2065 - Longevity treatments that can halt aging | Invisibility suits are in military use | Insurance crisis

2067 - Male and female salaries are reaching parity

2068 - A major landmark in the world of athletics

2069 - 100th anniversary of Apollo 11 | US population reaches half a billion

2070 - Large-scale evacuations are underway in many coastal cities | Fusion power is widespread | Fully automated homes | Expansion of Moon bases

2072 - Picotechnology is becoming practical

2074 - The Green Wall of China is completed

2075 - The ozone layer has fully recovered | London and other major cities are being flooded

2076 - Unmanned probes to Sedna

2079 - Practical flying cars are entering the consumer market | Total solar eclipse in New York

2080 - Some humans are more non-biological than biological | Construction of a transatlantic tunnel | Polar bears face extinction | One in five lizard species are extinct | Deadly heatwaves plague Europe; traditional agriculture is decimated

2082 - The USA cedes territory to Mexico

2083 - Hyper-intelligent computers

2084 - Androids are entering law enforcement

2085 - Global currency | Macro-scale teleportation is achieved

2085-2089 - Manned exploration of the Jovian system

2090 - Traditional religions are fading from European culture

2092 - West Antarctica is among the fastest growing areas in the world

2095 - Many of the world's languages are no longer in use | Manned exploration of the Saturnian system

2099 - Sea levels are wreaking havoc around the world | 83% of the Amazon rainforest has been lost

2100 - Much of the world is controlled by AI now | World GDP per capita exceeds US$200,000 | Nomadic floating cities are roaming the oceans | The chemistry of Earth's oceans has been radically altered | Emperor Penguins face extinction

2110 - Terraforming of Mars is underway | Force fields are in military use | Femtoengineering is practical | Man-made control of earthquakes and tsunamis | Our solar system is passing through a million degree cloud of gas

2120 - Mind uploading enters mainstream society | The International Space Elevator is operational

2130 - Large-scale civilian settlement of the Moon is underway

2140 - Teleportation of large stationary objects is possible

2150 - Interstellar travel is becoming possible | Androids physically indistinguishable from real humans | Hi-tech, automated cities

2151 - Total solar eclipse in London

2155 - Universal education in Africa

2160 - The world's first bicentenarians

2170 - The first kilometre-sized space station is complete

2180 - Antimatter power plants are coming online | Asteroid terrorism

2190 - Matter replication is available for the home | Global languages are becoming few in number now; education has been vastly accelerated | The West Antarctic ice sheet is beginning to disintegrate

2200 - The World in 2200 | Poverty, hunger and disease are being eradicated worldwide

2210 - A global rewilding effort is underway

2220 - Mind uploading is available to a multitude of platforms | The Light Year Array is operational

2230 - Antimatter-fueled starships

2240 - Christianity is fading from American culture

2250 - Humanity is becoming a Type 1 civilisation on the Kardashev scale

2260 - Accelerated development of the Solar System

2280 - Microbial life is confirmed on an exoplanet

We’re working on the next release of Cloudless Atlas, processing thousands upon thousands of huge Landsat scenes. Many techniques carry over smoothly from our cloudless MODIS project, but the number of pixels is on another level entirely – on the order of 20 trillion. We’re planning for a cluster of 400 servers just to manage the petabytes of data downloads. The main pipeline, though: that will be a cloud unto itself, with just over 1000 high-end machines, each applying our tuned processing kernels to millions of pixels per second. It’s been fun crunching the numbers to get this set up, but the best part is seeing the beautiful images we can produce: www.mapbox.com/blog/cloudless-landsat-preview/

The RHIC ATLAS Computing Facility is at the center of a global computing network connecting more than 2,500 researchers around the world with the data from RHIC and the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe. This world-class center houses an ever-expanding farm of computing cores (50,000 as of 2015), receiving data from the millions of particle collisions that take place each second at RHIC, along with petabytes of data generated by the LHC’s ATLAS experiment—storing, processing, and distributing that data to and running analysis jobs for collaborators around the nation and the world.

Spotted at a new datacenter: an interesting, custom SPARC-based computing system for very large scientific workloads — this rack is part of a computer cluster that can solve a system of linear equations with more than ten million variables.

Each SPARC CPU is a 8-core chip clocked at 2GHz, and each core has 256 (!) double precision floating-point registers and four multiply-add units. That number of FP registers is sufficient to compute a 8x8 matrix multiplication without requiring any access to RAM beyond the initial loading and final storing of the FP data. Accesses to the "slow" L1, L2 caches and RAM are thus minimized, allowing the CPU to crunch numbers at high speed.

Operations on large matrixes can be efficiently divided e.g. into 8x8 block decompositions that fit in the register file.

Each multiply-add unit can output on each clock cycle the result of an operation of the form D := A * B + C where A, B and C are double precision FP numbers.

The SPARC CPU's maximum FP throughput is thus 2GHz * 8 cores * 4 fused mutiply-adds = 128 GFLOPs/CPU. Each SPARC CPU has a memory bandwidth of 64GBytes/s.

A SPARC CPU, together with 16GB of RAM and an Interconnect Controller (ICC), form a unified "compute node".

The ICC combines, on a single VLSI, four 5GBytes/s DMA interfaces and a crossbar switch / router with ten 5GBytes/s bidirectional links. These ten links connect to other compute nodes, forming a virtual 6D fused torus / mesh network structure.

Compute nodes can access the memory of other nodes using virtual addressing, as a remote DMA operation. The ICC of the destination node performs the required virtual to physical address translation and the actual DMA. The ICC can also perform simple arithmetic operations on integers and FP data, enabling the parallel computation by the communication fabric itself of barrier operations, without having to involve the SPARC CPU.

Four compute nodes are integrated on each system board, and each rack holds 24 hot swappable system boards.

The picture shows the upper twelve system boards in a rack. Also visible are the nine air-cooled, redundant power supply units, the six I/O controller units, as well as two blade-like, redundant rack supervisor controllers and a Fujitsu storage array containing the operating system boot disks.

The six I/O controller units are water-cooled, and each contains one unified compute node. These I/O controllers connect the rack to other racks and to a high-speed clustered local storage system with a capacity of about 11 petabytes, and a global file system of about 30 PBytes. The operating system of the unified compute nodes is a custom fault-resilient multi-core Linux kernel; the mass storage system is based on Lustre.

The peak FP performance of each rack is 128 GFLOPs/compute node * (4 compute nodes / system board * 24 system boards + 6 I/O controller compute nodes ) / rack = 128GFLOPs * (4*24+6) = 13056 GFLOPs, or 13.056 TeraFLOPs; the total memory size per rack is 1632 Gigabytes.

Each rack requires about 10KW of electrical power, and the high-speed 6D torus inter-node connection fabric has been designed to efficiently extend to hundreds of such racks. Beware that electricity bill...

In this data center, a cluster of 864 of these racks form a massive parallel supercomputer, with 1400 Terabytes of RAM, and a theoretical peak FP performance of 13.056 TFLOPs * 864 = 11.280 PetaFLOPs — i.e. more than eleven million gigaFLOPs.

The effective LINPACK performance is about 93% of that theoretical peak.

The main intended application area seems to be the life sciences, with an emphasis on molecular modelling ab initio — simulating complete molecules starting from the quantum behavior of elementary nucleons and electrons — to assist the design of new drugs, simulate biochemical processes like chemotherapy agent resistance of cancer cells at the molecular level, model neural processes etc.

Climate modelling, atomic level simulation of novel nanomaterials and computational fluid dynamics applications are also in the input queue.

The RHIC ATLAS Computing Facility is at the center of a global computing network connecting more than 2,500 researchers around the world with the data from RHIC and the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe. This world-class center houses an ever-expanding farm of computing cores (50,000 as of 2015), receiving data from the millions of particle collisions that take place each second at RHIC, along with petabytes of data generated by the LHC’s ATLAS experiment—storing, processing, and distributing that data to and running analysis jobs for collaborators around the nation and the world.

Edited Event Horizon Telescope image of a black hole in the the galaxy M87. What you see here isn't the actual black hole but material tat has been heated to super-hot temperatures and glows as a result of being so close to the black hole and rubbing against other particles. Larger image to follow. Color/processing variant.

Image source: eventhorizontelescope.org/

First original caption: Scientists have obtained the first image of a black hole, using Event Horizon Telescope observations of the center of the galaxy M87. The image shows a bright ring formed as light bends in the intense gravity around a black hole that is 6.5 billion times more massive than the Sun. This long-sought image provides the strongest evidence to date for the existence of supermassive black holes and opens a new window onto the study of black holes, their event horizons, and gravity. Credit: Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration

Second original caption: Astronomers Capture First Image of a Black Hole

An international collaboration presents paradigm-shifting observations of the gargantuan black hole at the heart of distant galaxy Messier 87

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) — a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes forged through international collaboration — was designed to capture images of a black hole. Today, in coordinated press conferences across the globe, EHT researchers reveal that they have succeeded, unveiling the first direct visual evidence of a supermassive black hole and its shadow.

This breakthrough was announced today in a series of six papers published in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The image reveals the black hole at the center of Messier 87 [1], a massive galaxy in the nearby Virgo galaxy cluster. This black hole resides 55 million light-years from Earth and has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the Sun [2].

The EHT links telescopes around the globe to form an Earth-sized virtual telescope with unprecedented sensitivity and resolution [3]. The EHT is the result of years of international collaboration, and offers scientists a new way to study the most extreme objects in the Universe predicted by Einstein’s general relativity during the centennial year of the historic experiment that first confirmed the theory [4].

"We have taken the first picture of a black hole," said EHT project director Sheperd S. Doeleman of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. "This is an extraordinary scientific feat accomplished by a team of more than 200 researchers."

Black holes are extraordinary cosmic objects with enormous masses but extremely compact sizes. The presence of these objects affects their environment in extreme ways, warping spacetime and super-heating any surrounding material.

"If immersed in a bright region, like a disc of glowing gas, we expect a black hole to create a dark region similar to a shadow — something predicted by Einstein’s general relativity that we’ve never seen before, explained chair of the EHT Science Council Heino Falcke of Radboud University, the Netherlands. "This shadow, caused by the gravitational bending and capture of light by the event horizon, reveals a lot about the nature of these fascinating objects and allowed us to measure the enormous mass of M87’s black hole."

Multiple calibration and imaging methods have revealed a ring-like structure with a dark central region — the black hole’s shadow — that persisted over multiple independent EHT observations.

"Once we were sure we had imaged the shadow, we could compare our observations to extensive computer models that include the physics of warped space, superheated matter and strong magnetic fields. Many of the features of the observed image match our theoretical understanding surprisingly well," remarks Paul T.P. Ho, EHT Board member and Director of the East Asian Observatory [5]. "This makes us confident about the interpretation of our observations, including our estimation of the black hole’s mass."

Creating the EHT was a formidable challenge which required upgrading and connecting a worldwide network of eight pre-existing telescopes deployed at a variety of challenging high-altitude sites. These locations included volcanoes in Hawai`i and Mexico, mountains in Arizona and the Spanish Sierra Nevada, the Chilean Atacama Desert, and Antarctica.

The EHT observations use a technique called very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI) which synchronises telescope facilities around the world and exploits the rotation of our planet to form one huge, Earth-size telescope observing at a wavelength of 1.3 mm. VLBI allows the EHT to achieve an angular resolution of 20 micro-arcseconds — enough to read a newspaper in New York from a sidewalk café in Paris [6].

The telescopes contributing to this result were ALMA, APEX, the IRAM 30-meter telescope, the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, the Large Millimeter Telescope Alfonso Serrano, the Submillimeter Array, the Submillimeter Telescope, and the South Pole Telescope [7]. Petabytes of raw data from the telescopes were combined by highly specialised supercomputers hosted by the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy and MIT Haystack Observatory.

The construction of the EHT and the observations announced today represent the culmination of decades of observational, technical, and theoretical work. This example of global teamwork required close collaboration by researchers from around the world. Thirteen partner institutions worked together to create the EHT, using both pre-existing infrastructure and support from a variety of agencies. Key funding was provided by the US National Science Foundation (NSF), the EU's European Research Council (ERC), and funding agencies in East Asia.

"We have achieved something presumed to be impossible just a generation ago," concluded Doeleman. "Breakthroughs in technology, connections between the world's best radio observatories, and innovative algorithms all came together to open an entirely new window on black holes and the event horizon."

Notes

[1] The shadow of a black hole is the closest we can come to an image of the black hole itself, a completely dark object from which light cannot escape. The black hole’s boundary — the event horizon from which the EHT takes its name — is around 2.5 times smaller than the shadow it casts and measures just under 40 billion km across.

[2] Supermassive black holes are relatively tiny astronomical objects — which has made them impossible to directly observe until now. As a black hole’s size is proportional to its mass, the more massive a black hole, the larger the shadow. Thanks to its enormous mass and relative proximity, M87’s black hole was predicted to be one of the largest viewable from Earth — making it a perfect target for the EHT.

[3] Although the telescopes are not physically connected, they are able to synchronize their recorded data with atomic clocks — hydrogen masers — which precisely time their observations. These observations were collected at a wavelength of 1.3 mm during a 2017 global campaign. Each telescope of the EHT produced enormous amounts of data — roughly 350 terabytes per day — which was stored on high-performance helium-filled hard drives. These data were flown to highly specialised supercomputers — known as correlators — at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy and MIT Haystack Observatory to be combined. They were then painstakingly converted into an image using novel computational tools developed by the collaboration.

[4] 100 years ago, two expeditions set out for the island of Príncipe off the coast of Africa and Sobra in Brazil to observe the 1919 solar eclipse, with the goal of testing general relativity by seeing if starlight would be bent around the limb of the sun, as predicted by Einstein. In an echo of those observations, the EHT has sent team members to some of the world's highest and isolated radio facilities to once again test our understanding of gravity.

[5] The East Asian Observatory (EAO) partner on the EHT project represents the participation of many regions in Asia, including China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, India and Indonesia.

[6] Future EHT observations will see substantially increased sensitivity with the participation of the IRAM NOEMA Observatory, the Greenland Telescope and the Kitt Peak Telescope.

[7] ALMA is a partnership of the European Southern Observatory (ESO; Europe, representing its member states), the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), and the National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS) of Japan, together with the National Research Council (Canada), the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST; Taiwan), Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics (ASIAA; Taiwan), and Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI; Republic of Korea), in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. APEX is operated by ESO, the 30-meter telescope is operated by IRAM (the IRAM Partner Organizations are MPG (Germany), CNRS (France) and IGN (Spain)), the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope is operated by the EAO, the Large Millimeter Telescope Alfonso Serrano is operated by INAOE and UMass, the Submillimeter Array is operated by SAO and ASIAA and the Submillimeter Telescope is operated by the Arizona Radio Observatory (ARO). The South Pole Telescope is operated by the University of Chicago with specialized EHT instrumentation provided by the University of Arizona.

More Information

This research was presented in a series of six papers published today in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters, along with a Focus Issue:

Paper I: The Shadow of the Supermassive Black Hole

Paper II: Array and Instrumentation

Paper III: Data processing and Calibration

Paper IV: Imaging the Central Supermassive Black Hole

Paper V: Physical Origin of the Asymmetric Ring

Paper VI: The Shadow and Mass of the Central Black Hole

Press release images in higher resolution (4000x2330 pixels) can be found here in PNG (16-bit), and JPG (8-bit) format. The highest-quality image (7416x4320 pixels, TIF, 16-bit, 180 Mb) can be obtained from repositories of our partners, NSF and ESO. A summary of latest press and media resources can be found on this page.

The EHT collaboration involves more than 200 researchers from Africa, Asia, Europe, North and South America. The international collaboration is working to capture the most detailed black hole images ever by creating a virtual Earth-sized telescope. Supported by considerable international investment, the EHT links existing telescopes using novel systems — creating a fundamentally new instrument with the highest angular resolving power that has yet been achieved.

The individual telescopes involved are; ALMA, APEX, the IRAM 30-meter Telescope, the IRAM NOEMA Observatory, the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT), the Large Millimeter Telescope Alfonso Serrano (LMT), the Submillimeter Array (SMA), the Submillimeter Telescope (SMT), the South Pole Telescope (SPT), the Kitt Peak Telescope, and the Greenland Telescope (GLT).

The EHT collaboration consists of 13 stakeholder institutes; the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, the University of Arizona, the University of Chicago, the East Asian Observatory, Goethe-Universitaet Frankfurt, Institut de Radioastronomie Millimétrique, Large Millimeter Telescope, Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, MIT Haystack Observatory, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Radboud University and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.

Contact Information

Sheperd S. Doeleman

EHT Collaboration Director

Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian

60 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138

E-mail: sdoeleman@cfa.harvard.edu

Phone: +1-617-496-7762

Peter D. Edmonds

Public Information Officer

Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian

60 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138

E-mail: pedmonds@cfa.harvard.edu

Phone: +1-617-571-7279

EHT Outreach Working Group

E-mail: ehtelescope@gmail.com

***BUMP ***

In honor of the fantastic, heroic work they are doing, saving websites that are being scrubbed by the Feds from extinction, so all the data on LGBTQIA+ people, People of Color, women… is not being lost to the chainsaw tantrum of the twin mediocre man-children.

====================================================

The San Francisco location of the Internet Archive sits at 300 Funston St., at the site of a former Christian Science church. Rumor has it that they bought it, in part, because the front of the building matched the already-existing logo.

The Internet Archive has a noble mission: “to give everyone access to all knowledge, forever.” This includes the Live Music Archive (LMA), which is a collection of over 250,000 concert recordings of taper-friendly bands in lossless audio formats.

The servers are cooled with ambient air, and the rest of the building is heated with the captured heat emitted by them (it IS San Francisco after all). The Archive, in total, hosts 180 petabytes of data, worldwide, with 15 petabytes residing in this location.

1 petabyte = 1024 terabytes or 1024x1024 gigabytes (or approximately 5.289e+17 bytes).

Work on the camera for the future Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) has reached a major milestone with the completion and delivery of the camera’s fully integrated cryostat. With 3.2 gigapixels, the LSST camera will be the largest digital camera ever built for ground-based astronomy. It’s being assembled at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

The cryostat provides the optical bench (a silicon carbide grid) that keeps the large 65cm diameter focal plane–composed of 189 CCD imaging sensors–flat to within just a tenth of the width of a human hair, while simultaneously cooling them uniformly to minus 150 degrees Fahrenheit. It also provides cooling for their readout electronics which reside just behind the focal plane. And it maintains all this hardware in a clean, contaminant-free, high-vacuum environment.

With the LSST camera, scientists will be able to capture images of the entire Southern sky every few days for a period of 10 years, producing petabytes of unprecedented astrophysical data.

The cryostat is now located in the LSST Camera clean room at SLAC, where it’s undergoing vacuum testing. When completed, the camera will be shipped to its final home on a mountaintop in Chile. (Andy Freeberg/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory)

Edited Event Horizon Telescope image of a black hole in the the galaxy M87. What you see here isn't the actual black hole but material tat has been heated to super-hot temperatures and glows as a result of being so close to the black hole and rubbing against other particles. Larger image to follow. Inverted grayscale variant.

Image source: eventhorizontelescope.org/

First original caption: Scientists have obtained the first image of a black hole, using Event Horizon Telescope observations of the center of the galaxy M87. The image shows a bright ring formed as light bends in the intense gravity around a black hole that is 6.5 billion times more massive than the Sun. This long-sought image provides the strongest evidence to date for the existence of supermassive black holes and opens a new window onto the study of black holes, their event horizons, and gravity. Credit: Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration

Second original caption: Astronomers Capture First Image of a Black Hole

An international collaboration presents paradigm-shifting observations of the gargantuan black hole at the heart of distant galaxy Messier 87

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) — a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes forged through international collaboration — was designed to capture images of a black hole. Today, in coordinated press conferences across the globe, EHT researchers reveal that they have succeeded, unveiling the first direct visual evidence of a supermassive black hole and its shadow.

This breakthrough was announced today in a series of six papers published in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The image reveals the black hole at the center of Messier 87 [1], a massive galaxy in the nearby Virgo galaxy cluster. This black hole resides 55 million light-years from Earth and has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the Sun [2].

The EHT links telescopes around the globe to form an Earth-sized virtual telescope with unprecedented sensitivity and resolution [3]. The EHT is the result of years of international collaboration, and offers scientists a new way to study the most extreme objects in the Universe predicted by Einstein’s general relativity during the centennial year of the historic experiment that first confirmed the theory [4].

"We have taken the first picture of a black hole," said EHT project director Sheperd S. Doeleman of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. "This is an extraordinary scientific feat accomplished by a team of more than 200 researchers."

Black holes are extraordinary cosmic objects with enormous masses but extremely compact sizes. The presence of these objects affects their environment in extreme ways, warping spacetime and super-heating any surrounding material.

"If immersed in a bright region, like a disc of glowing gas, we expect a black hole to create a dark region similar to a shadow — something predicted by Einstein’s general relativity that we’ve never seen before, explained chair of the EHT Science Council Heino Falcke of Radboud University, the Netherlands. "This shadow, caused by the gravitational bending and capture of light by the event horizon, reveals a lot about the nature of these fascinating objects and allowed us to measure the enormous mass of M87’s black hole."

Multiple calibration and imaging methods have revealed a ring-like structure with a dark central region — the black hole’s shadow — that persisted over multiple independent EHT observations.

"Once we were sure we had imaged the shadow, we could compare our observations to extensive computer models that include the physics of warped space, superheated matter and strong magnetic fields. Many of the features of the observed image match our theoretical understanding surprisingly well," remarks Paul T.P. Ho, EHT Board member and Director of the East Asian Observatory [5]. "This makes us confident about the interpretation of our observations, including our estimation of the black hole’s mass."

Creating the EHT was a formidable challenge which required upgrading and connecting a worldwide network of eight pre-existing telescopes deployed at a variety of challenging high-altitude sites. These locations included volcanoes in Hawai`i and Mexico, mountains in Arizona and the Spanish Sierra Nevada, the Chilean Atacama Desert, and Antarctica.

The EHT observations use a technique called very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI) which synchronises telescope facilities around the world and exploits the rotation of our planet to form one huge, Earth-size telescope observing at a wavelength of 1.3 mm. VLBI allows the EHT to achieve an angular resolution of 20 micro-arcseconds — enough to read a newspaper in New York from a sidewalk café in Paris [6].

The telescopes contributing to this result were ALMA, APEX, the IRAM 30-meter telescope, the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, the Large Millimeter Telescope Alfonso Serrano, the Submillimeter Array, the Submillimeter Telescope, and the South Pole Telescope [7]. Petabytes of raw data from the telescopes were combined by highly specialised supercomputers hosted by the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy and MIT Haystack Observatory.

The construction of the EHT and the observations announced today represent the culmination of decades of observational, technical, and theoretical work. This example of global teamwork required close collaboration by researchers from around the world. Thirteen partner institutions worked together to create the EHT, using both pre-existing infrastructure and support from a variety of agencies. Key funding was provided by the US National Science Foundation (NSF), the EU's European Research Council (ERC), and funding agencies in East Asia.

"We have achieved something presumed to be impossible just a generation ago," concluded Doeleman. "Breakthroughs in technology, connections between the world's best radio observatories, and innovative algorithms all came together to open an entirely new window on black holes and the event horizon."

Notes

[1] The shadow of a black hole is the closest we can come to an image of the black hole itself, a completely dark object from which light cannot escape. The black hole’s boundary — the event horizon from which the EHT takes its name — is around 2.5 times smaller than the shadow it casts and measures just under 40 billion km across.

[2] Supermassive black holes are relatively tiny astronomical objects — which has made them impossible to directly observe until now. As a black hole’s size is proportional to its mass, the more massive a black hole, the larger the shadow. Thanks to its enormous mass and relative proximity, M87’s black hole was predicted to be one of the largest viewable from Earth — making it a perfect target for the EHT.

[3] Although the telescopes are not physically connected, they are able to synchronize their recorded data with atomic clocks — hydrogen masers — which precisely time their observations. These observations were collected at a wavelength of 1.3 mm during a 2017 global campaign. Each telescope of the EHT produced enormous amounts of data — roughly 350 terabytes per day — which was stored on high-performance helium-filled hard drives. These data were flown to highly specialised supercomputers — known as correlators — at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy and MIT Haystack Observatory to be combined. They were then painstakingly converted into an image using novel computational tools developed by the collaboration.

[4] 100 years ago, two expeditions set out for the island of Príncipe off the coast of Africa and Sobra in Brazil to observe the 1919 solar eclipse, with the goal of testing general relativity by seeing if starlight would be bent around the limb of the sun, as predicted by Einstein. In an echo of those observations, the EHT has sent team members to some of the world's highest and isolated radio facilities to once again test our understanding of gravity.

[5] The East Asian Observatory (EAO) partner on the EHT project represents the participation of many regions in Asia, including China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, India and Indonesia.

[6] Future EHT observations will see substantially increased sensitivity with the participation of the IRAM NOEMA Observatory, the Greenland Telescope and the Kitt Peak Telescope.

[7] ALMA is a partnership of the European Southern Observatory (ESO; Europe, representing its member states), the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), and the National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS) of Japan, together with the National Research Council (Canada), the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST; Taiwan), Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics (ASIAA; Taiwan), and Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI; Republic of Korea), in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. APEX is operated by ESO, the 30-meter telescope is operated by IRAM (the IRAM Partner Organizations are MPG (Germany), CNRS (France) and IGN (Spain)), the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope is operated by the EAO, the Large Millimeter Telescope Alfonso Serrano is operated by INAOE and UMass, the Submillimeter Array is operated by SAO and ASIAA and the Submillimeter Telescope is operated by the Arizona Radio Observatory (ARO). The South Pole Telescope is operated by the University of Chicago with specialized EHT instrumentation provided by the University of Arizona.

More Information

This research was presented in a series of six papers published today in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters, along with a Focus Issue:

Paper I: The Shadow of the Supermassive Black Hole

Paper II: Array and Instrumentation

Paper III: Data processing and Calibration

Paper IV: Imaging the Central Supermassive Black Hole

Paper V: Physical Origin of the Asymmetric Ring

Paper VI: The Shadow and Mass of the Central Black Hole

Press release images in higher resolution (4000x2330 pixels) can be found here in PNG (16-bit), and JPG (8-bit) format. The highest-quality image (7416x4320 pixels, TIF, 16-bit, 180 Mb) can be obtained from repositories of our partners, NSF and ESO. A summary of latest press and media resources can be found on this page.

The EHT collaboration involves more than 200 researchers from Africa, Asia, Europe, North and South America. The international collaboration is working to capture the most detailed black hole images ever by creating a virtual Earth-sized telescope. Supported by considerable international investment, the EHT links existing telescopes using novel systems — creating a fundamentally new instrument with the highest angular resolving power that has yet been achieved.

The individual telescopes involved are; ALMA, APEX, the IRAM 30-meter Telescope, the IRAM NOEMA Observatory, the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT), the Large Millimeter Telescope Alfonso Serrano (LMT), the Submillimeter Array (SMA), the Submillimeter Telescope (SMT), the South Pole Telescope (SPT), the Kitt Peak Telescope, and the Greenland Telescope (GLT).

The EHT collaboration consists of 13 stakeholder institutes; the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, the University of Arizona, the University of Chicago, the East Asian Observatory, Goethe-Universitaet Frankfurt, Institut de Radioastronomie Millimétrique, Large Millimeter Telescope, Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, MIT Haystack Observatory, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Radboud University and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.

Contact Information

Sheperd S. Doeleman

EHT Collaboration Director

Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian

60 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138

E-mail: sdoeleman@cfa.harvard.edu

Phone: +1-617-496-7762

Peter D. Edmonds

Public Information Officer

Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian

60 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138

E-mail: pedmonds@cfa.harvard.edu

Phone: +1-617-571-7279

EHT Outreach Working Group

E-mail: ehtelescope@gmail.com

Motivational Poster for the Petabyte Dataparty crew ;-)

Each one of those 1U red boxes contains 4 750GB HDs. Each one of those racks has 40 of those red petaboxes. Each of those racks adds up to 120 terabytes. Those boxes power the Internet Archive (archive.org). 3 PETAbytes (3,000,000GB) of low power, compact storage from Capricorn Technologies. It's geek pr0n. But it's really cool to see in person.

© All rights reserved, don't use without permission

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN near Geneva is the largest scientific instrument on the planet.

It will produce roughly 15 Petabytes (15 million Gigabytes) of data annually, which thousands of scientists around the world will access and analyse.

Here's a (small) part of the computers which will process these data.

CERN, Meyrin - Geneva, Switzerland

This image shows a simulation of the earth's temperature in the year 2090, based on research conducted on data at the German Climate Computing Center. Such simulations and other research on the more than 40 petabytes of data at the center require technology and services from IBM to provide quick, efficient access to such a large archive of information.

Credit: German Climate Computing Center

EDIT: Larger size, hosted by courtesy of tOkKa:

www.flickr.com/photos/terrible2z/3586724855/

I happened to find the original box to the 1993 release of Playmates Toys' Mutatin' Foot Soldier, and luckily the Mega Mutation Chart was still inside. It is pretty awesome, even better than I remembered. Who knew the mighty Foot Clan began their criminal career as mere light blubs before evolving into circuit boards, Alien-esque embryos, and Terminator cyborgs? But just look at that impressive memory enhancements brought about by the mutagen! He maxes out at just over 1 Petabyte (i.e., 1,000 Terabytes; i.e., 1,000,000 Gigabytes!) And all this is in 1993, no less! Dang, you would think with all that digital storage space, Shredder would be able to program them with some decent anti-Turtle fighting defense! Alas, the Turtles go through the Foot Soldiers by the dozen. But in this case, I think the blame falls on the programmer rather than the hardware. Let's face it, Shredder was a techno-flunkie who probably needed Krang to help him set the clock of his VCR.

Special thanks to tOkKa for reminding me of how cool these charts were!

And I apologize for the relatively small size. The original file size is quite large, but apparently my flickr account doesn't have the capacity to host the largest file size. :-(

There's a lot in here that you will never see again. The dogleg of Major Mack at Huntingdon was removed not long after this video was made. That intersection itself is currently being erased under the new interchange of Major Mack and the 427. The bow arch bridge seen at the end served as the Major Mackenzie bridge across the Humber until circa 1990. It has been closed to traffic for a year or so, and, I'm told by a local, is slated for demolition now that the sole house it served has been purchased by York Region and vacated. Everything you see on the north side (the left) between Huntingdon and Hwy 27 is now a subdivision. The jog at Major Mack and Hwy 27 is, itself, in the process of being removed, with a major bridge across the Humber already more or less complete as I write this. NB Well, apparently you don't get to see the bridge at the end because Flickr seems to still be playing games with video lengths like it's till 2010 when I shot this video instead of 2020 with petabytes of storage out there. :/

The High Performance Storage System (HPSS) at NERSC can efficiently manage up to 37 petabytes of science data by moving information from high-cost, high-speed disks to low-cost, energy efficient tapes. Thirty-seven petabytes of information is equal to all the music, videos or photos that could be stored on 321,900 iPod classics filled to capacity.

When a user requests HPSS data, a robot arm (bottom left) finds the cartridge using a bar code to verify the data inside. The robot then mounts the carridge in a tape drive, and streams the data back to the user. Typical tape mounts take between 30 and 90 seconds to complete.

NERSC currently runs two different HPSS systems: an archive that stores scientific data files generated by researchers around the world who want long-term retention of their information; and another backup system that contains copies of information from various other sources at NERSC, so that user data can be restored in the event of a disaster. This image shows one row in one of the new HPSS tape libraries. The new tape libraries increase HPSS theoretical capacity at NERSC to 37 petabytes.

NERSC’s HPSS system currently holds about 59,000 tapes, each with storage capacities ranging from 75 to 1,000 gigabytes. The oldest science file in HPSS is from January 2, 1976. As of 2009, the HPSS archive system contained over 69 million files and more than 4 petabytes of data; the HPSS backup system contained over 12 million files and about 3 petabytes of data. The systems are Sun Microsystems’ StorageTek SL8500 Modular Library Systems.

credit: Lawrence Berkeley Nat'l Lab - Roy Kaltschmidt, photographer

XBD200904-00140-01.TIF

The German Climate Computing Center in Hamburg hosts the largest archive of climate data in the world -- currently 40 petabytes of information, and projected to grow by as much as 75 petabytes annually over the next five years, requiring a High Performance Storage System from IBM. For comparison, one petabyte equals roughly 210,000 DVDs. The solution uses software developed by IBM and the U.S. Department of Energy, is supported by IBM services and incorporates IBM DB2 database software.

Credit: German Climate Computing Center

Work on the camera for the future Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) has reached a major milestone with the completion and delivery of the camera’s fully integrated cryostat. With 3.2 gigapixels, the LSST camera will be the largest digital camera ever built for ground-based astronomy. It’s being assembled at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

The cryostat provides the optical bench (a silicon carbide grid) that keeps the large 65cm diameter focal plane–composed of 189 CCD imaging sensors–flat to within just a tenth of the width of a human hair, while simultaneously cooling them uniformly to minus 150 degrees Fahrenheit. It also provides cooling for their readout electronics which reside just behind the focal plane. And it maintains all this hardware in a clean, contaminant-free, high-vacuum environment.

With the LSST camera, scientists will be able to capture images of the entire Southern sky every few days for a period of 10 years, producing petabytes of unprecedented astrophysical data.

The cryostat is now located in the LSST Camera clean room at SLAC, where it’s undergoing vacuum testing. When completed, the camera will be shipped to its final home on a mountaintop in Chile.

Salk #researchers and #collaborators have achieved critical insight into the size of #neural connections, putting the #memory capacity of the #brain far higher than common estimates. The new work also answers a longstanding question as to how the brain is so energy efficient and could help #engineers build #computers that are incredibly powerful but also #conserve #energy .

"This is a real bombshell in the field of #neuroscience," says Terry Sejnowski, Salk professor and co-senior author of the paper, which was published in eLife. "We discovered the key to unlocking the design principle for how #hippocampal #neurons function with low energy but high computation power. Our new measurements of the brain's memory capacity increase conservative estimates by a factor of 10 to at least a #petabyte, in the same ballpark as the #World #Wide #Web ."

Our memories and thoughts are the result of patterns of #electrical and #chemical activity in the brain. A key part of the activity happens when branches of neurons, much like electrical wire, interact at certain junctions, known as synapses. An output 'wire' (an axon) from one neuron connects to an input 'wire' (a dendrite) of a second neuron. Signals travel across the synapse as chemicals called neurotransmitters to tell the receiving neuron whether to convey an electrical signal to other neurons. Each neuron can have thousands of these synapses with thousands of other neurons.

The CTAO Science Data Management Centre (SDMC) will be the science data gateway of the CTAO. Tens of Petabytes (PB) of simulated as well as processed data gathered at both CTAO telescope sites will be generated, further processed and accessible at the SDMC. The SDMC will be located in a new building complex on the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) campus in Zeuthen, just outside Berlin (Germany).

Credit: Heinle, Wischer und Partner | Freie Architekten.

The CTAO Science Data Management Centre (SDMC) will be the science data gateway of the CTAO. Tens of Petabytes (PB) of simulated as well as processed data gathered at both CTAO telescope sites will be generated, further processed and accessible at the SDMC. The SDMC will be located in a new building complex on the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) campus in Zeuthen, just outside Berlin (Germany).

Credit: Heinle, Wischer und Partner | Freie Architekten.

The CTAO Science Data Management Centre (SDMC) will be the science data gateway of the CTAO. Tens of Petabytes (PB) of simulated as well as processed data gathered at both CTAO telescope sites will be generated, further processed and accessible at the SDMC. The SDMC will be located in a new building complex on the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) campus in Zeuthen, just outside Berlin (Germany).

Credit: Heinle, Wischer und Partner | Freie Architekten.

256GB SanDisk Cruzer Ultra USB 3.0 Flash Drive for 20$/€ ( 80 $ / TB ) | Black Friday 2022 DataHoardersDeals Storage Deals - Cyber Monday Sales | #blackfriday #blackfriday2022 #bluefriday2022 #sandisk #usbstick | US ift.tt/jvtfo4V EU ift.tt/J1MjTHq - ift.tt/p4FygG5 via /r/datahoardingsales ift.tt/kaOHCMr #datahoardersdeals #storage #datahoarder #datahoarders #datahoarding #appledatahoarder #appledatahoarding #memory #terabyte #gigabyte #petabyte #exabyte #ssd #hdd #drive #disk #nas #backup #upload #download #swissdatahoarding #swissdatahoarder

Shown here is one of the disc enclosures In the High Performance Storage System IBM is providing to help the German Climate Computing Center manage the world's largest archive of climate data. The solution provides 5 petabytes of disk cache and access speeds of up to 12 gigabytes per second to more than 40 petabytes of climate data for leading researchers studying weather, the environment and the effects of climate change.

Credit: German Climate Computing Center

October 20, 2015. One advantage of being in Ottawa is that I can zip downtown to check out the trade show at the GTEC conference. From Moncton this would require travel authority, a flight, and accommodation. And I would eat to take in the full conference - another $500 or so - if I were spending that kind of money. Total investment would be $2000 or so. So that's what I saved NRC today by moving here to Ottawa. Did they pay the cost of my move? Nope. They even charged me to move my office. Anyhow, this is a petabyte of flash memory. I didn't ask how much it cost.

Sent from my Samsung device over Bell's LTE network.

The Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) is home to Titan, the nation’s most powerful supercomputer for open science.

Titan is a hybrid-architecture Cray XK7 system with a theoretical peak performance exceeding 27,000 trillion calculations per second (27 petaflops). It contains both advanced 16-core AMD Opteron central processing units (CPUs) and NVIDIA Kepler graphics processing units (GPUs). GPUs are energy-efficient, high-performance chips originally developed for gaming systems. The combination of these two technologies allows Titan to achieve 10 times the speed and 5 times the energy efficiency of its predecessor, the Jaguar supercomputer, while using only modestly more energy and occupying the same physical footprint.

Titan features 18,688 compute nodes, a total system memory of 710 terabytes, and Cray’s high-performance Gemini network. Its 299,008 CPU cores guide simulations while the accompanying GPUs that can handle hundreds of calculations simultaneously. The system provides decreased time to solution, increased complexity of models, and greater realism in simulations.

Titan is enabling researchers across the scientific arena to acquire unparalleled accuracy in their simulations and achieve research breakthroughs more rapidly than ever before. OLCF simulations have improved the safety and performance of nuclear power plants, turbomachinery, and aircraft; aided understanding of climate change; sped development of new drugs and advanced materials; and guided design of the ITER international fusion reactor. Researchers have used OLCF systems to model supernovas, hurricanes, biofuels, neurodegenerative diseases, and clean combustion for power and propulsion.

Titan users have access to data analysis and visualization resources that include the Eos and Rhea systems and the Exploratory Visualization Environment for REsearch in Science and Technology, or EVEREST. Users also have access to file systems—like Spider for immediate data storage, with over 1,000 gigabytes per second of aggregate data bandwidth and more than 30 petabytes of storage capacity, and the High Performance Storage System (HPSS) for archival data storage—to manage the floods of data that Titan’s simulations generate. All of these resources are available through high-performance networks including ESnet’s upgraded 100 gigabit per second links.

Computational scientists gain access to OLCF’s cutting-edge facilities and support systems through three programs that allocate millions of processor hours. The Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment program, or INCITE, supports large-scale, high-impact projects that make concurrent use of at least 20 percent of Titan’s cores. The Advanced Scientific Computing Research Leadership Computing Challenge, or ALCC program, primarily aids research that supports the energy mission of the Department of Energy’s Office of Science and emphasizes high-risk, high-rewards endeavors. And the OLCF’s Director’s Discretionary program helps new high-performance computing users explore topics of national importance.

Research challenges remain, but Titan is helping launch a new era for science and engineering as computing approaches the exascale, or a million trillion calculations a second.

Eye Filmmuseum is a film archive, museum, and cinema in Amsterdam that preserves and presents both Dutch and foreign films screened in the Netherlands.

Location and history

Eye Filmmuseum is located in the Overhoeks neighborhood of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Its predecessor was the Dutch Historical Film Archive, founded in 1946 by David van Staveren, Felix Halverstad, and directors of Filmtheater Kriterion Piet Meerburg and Paul Kijzer. Following the accession of the archives of the Filmtheater de Uitkijk, the archive was renamed the Netherlands Filmmuseum under the leadership of its first director, film collector Jan de Vaal. The Filmmuseum was located in Kriterion and Stedelijk Museum until 1975, when de Vaal succeeded in acquiring a discrete space for the Filmmuseum in the Vondelpark Pavilion. In 2009, Nederlands Filmmuseum merged with Holland Film, the Netherlands Institute for Film Education and the Filmbank and plans were announced for a new home on the north bank of Amsterdam's waterfront. The Filmmuseum was renamed the Eye Film Institute Netherlands and was officially opened on April 4, 2012, by Queen Beatrix.

Buildings

Eye Filmmuseum

The Eye Filmmuseum building is designed by Delugan Meissl Associated Architects, whose other projects include the Porsche Museum in Stuttgart. The building features two gallery exhibition spaces, one 300-seat cinema, two 127-seat cinemas, and a fourth intimate cinema of about 67 seats. One of the gallery spaces is devoted to a permanent exhibition on the technical and aesthetic histories of cinema. The exhibit includes historical equipment drawn from the Museum's collection of approximately 1,500 cinematic apparatuses, as well as an immersive presentation of about one hundred film clips from the Museum's archive, including Dutch and international films dating from the silent era and beyond. The second gallery space is dedicated to experimental cinema or expanded cinema, a commitment which dates back to the Filmmuseum's founding and the weekly screenings it organized at the Stedelijk Museum in the 1950s under the emerging aegis of cinema as a "seventh art."[ Past exhibitions in this space have focused on auteurs and cinematographers, as well as video artists and visual artists like Ryoji Ikeda and Anthony McCall.

Eye Collection Center

In 2016, Eye opened its new Collection Center, designed by cepezed. The collection is made up of analog, digitized, and born-digital materials which are situated beside a sound restoration and digitization studio, a digital image restoration studio, and a grading and scanning suite. The collection includes 210,000 cans of acetate film, 57,000 film titles, 2.5 petabytes of digital data, 82,000 posters, 700,000 photographs, 27,000 books, 2,000 journals, 1,500 pre-cinema and film apparatuses, 4,500 magic lantern slides, 7,000 musical scores, and 250,000 press cuttings.

The collection originally consisted of films from the Uitkijk archive, compiled by members of the Dutch Filmliga (1927–1933).[12] After joining the International Federation of Film archives (FIAF) in 1947, the Filmmuseum started to actively collect and preserve Dutch film productions. Since then, a number of significant collections have been acquired, ranging from Dutch distributors (Desmet, Centra, and UIP); filmmakers (Joris Ivens, Johan van der Keuken, and Louis van Gasteren); and producers (Matthijs van Heijningen and Kees Kasander) to institutions and organizations, such as the Netherlands Film Academy; the Netherlands Film Fund; and the Netherlands Institute for Animation Film (NIAf). The collection also includes many seminal silent film works, Hollywood classics, international arthouse productions, and independent filmmakers of international renown.

Nitrate Bunkers

Eye stores 30,000 cans of flammable nitrate film in bunkers near the coast of North Holland in Overveen, Castricum and Heemskerk. These nitrate films date between 1896 and the mid-1950s and include a unique collection of 68mm film. Two of these bunkers were built during the Second World War to protect Dutch art museum holdings from theft and destruction; Rembrandt's The Night Watch was among a few of the paintings which were stored in the Castricum bunker for part of the war.

Restorations

Recent silent film Eye restorations include the formerly lost film Beyond the Rocks (1922) starring Gloria Swanson, J'accuse! (1919) by Abel Gance, The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928) by Germain Dulac, Raskolnikov (1923) by Robert Wiene, Flower of Evil (1915) by Carmine Gallone, and Shoes (1916) by Lois Weber.

Restorations of Dutch films include Wan Pipel (1976) by Dutch-Surinamese director Pim de la Parra, Zeemansvrouwen (1930) by Henk Kleinmann, Karakter (1997) by Mike van Diem, Spetters (1980) by Paul Verhoeven, and Abel (1986) by Alex van Warmerdam.

Other restorations include Eve (1962) by Joseph Losey, M (1931) by Fritz Lang, and We Can't Go Home Again (1979) by Nicholas Ray.

Projects

Eye is performing a major film digitization and preservation project together with IBM and Thought Equity Motion, a provider of video platform and rights development services. The project involves scanning and storing more than 150 million discrete DPX files on LTO Gen5 Tape in the Linear Tape File System format.

The institute's youth platform is named MovieZone (previously MovieSquad).

Annual events

International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (November)

Eye International Conference (May)

(Wikipedia)

Das EYE Filmmuseum (früher Nederlands Filmmuseum) in Amsterdam ist das nationale Filmmuseum der Niederlande.

Geschichte

Das Museum wurde 1946 als Nederlands Historisch Filmarchief gegründet und besteht seit 1952 unter seinem heutigen Namen. Seit 1972 befand sich das Filmmuseum in einem Pavillon im Amsterdamer Vondelpark. Der Vondelparkpaviljoen wurde 1874 bis 1881 nach Plänen von Willem Hamer jr. im Stil der Neorenaissance errichtet.

Das Filmmuseum verfügt über etwa 46.000 Filme (davon 7 Millionen Meter Zelluloidfilm aus der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts), mehr als 35.000 Filmplakate und rund 450.000 Fotografien. Selbstgesetztes Ziel des Museums ist die Bewahrung des filmgeschichtlichen Erbes und ebenso die Erhaltung einer lebendigen Filmkultur in den Niederlanden. Daher handelt es sich beim Bestand vor allem um niederländische Produktionen, aber auch ausländische Filme, die in niederländischen Kinos gelaufen sind. Das Museum hat zwei Filmvorführsäle und wird jährlich von mehr als 150.000 Besuchern frequentiert. Es führt auch Restaurierungen durch. Der Institution angeschlossen ist die größte niederländische Bibliothek für Filmliteratur. Im Keller des Museums ist ein Café-Restaurant untergebracht. 1991 wurde das Gebäude umfassend renoviert.

Am 5. April 2012 zog das Amsterdamer Filmmuseum in einen Neubau auf das Overhoeks genannte, ehemals dem niederländischen Ölkonzerns Shell gehörende Gelände am Nordufer der IJ, zu Füßen des Shell-Towers, um. Als Sieger aus dem ausgeschriebenen internationalen Gestaltungswettbewerb ging 2005 der Entwurf des österreichischen Architekturbüros Delugan Meissl Associated Architects hervor. Nach dem Umzug trägt das Museum den Namen EYE. Filmmuseum.

(Wikipedia)

Work on the camera for the future Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) has reached a major milestone with the completion and delivery of the camera’s fully integrated cryostat. With 3.2 gigapixels, the LSST camera will be the largest digital camera ever built for ground-based astronomy. It’s being assembled at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

The cryostat provides the optical bench (a silicon carbide grid) that keeps the large 65cm diameter focal plane–composed of 189 CCD imaging sensors–flat to within just a tenth of the width of a human hair, while simultaneously cooling them uniformly to minus 150 degrees Fahrenheit. It also provides cooling for their readout electronics which reside just behind the focal plane. And it maintains all this hardware in a clean, contaminant-free, high-vacuum environment.

With the LSST camera, scientists will be able to capture images of the entire Southern sky every few days for a period of 10 years, producing petabytes of unprecedented astrophysical data.

The cryostat is now located in the LSST Camera clean room at SLAC, where it’s undergoing vacuum testing. When completed, the camera will be shipped to its final home on a mountaintop in Chile.

Photo by Andy Freeberg/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Learn more: lsst.slac.stanford.edu