No Industry Escapes the Big Data Revolution
November 20, 2012
Those seeking objective and statistically produced facts know that big data is a major fuel source of such information. Every so often it is refreshing to take a peek at how big data influences many key fields of study and industry. The Guardian article “Big Data: Revolution by Numbers” outlines each of these areas and discusses the impact big data has had on each.
Everything from sports to medicine has been hugely revolutionized, or in the process of undergoing such changes, due to the utilization of big data. Powerful technologies and ideas have transformed daily operations and even yielded life-changing outcomes. For example, Cambridge researchers stopped an MRSA outbreak affecting 12 babies in the Rosie Hospital by rapidly sequencing the genome of the bacteria.
The article delves into some examples of data-intensive projects in scientific research:
The data recorded by each of the big experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Cern in Geneva is enough to fill around 100,000 DVDs every year. Or take the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which is measuring 500 distinct attributes for each of 100m galaxies, 100m stars and 1m quasars. The result: three terabytes of data, where a terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes. Analysing that volume of data is beyond the capacity of humans, so it has to be done by computers.
Enterprise organizations used to deal with the same overwhelming amounts of data stored and managed using legacy software. Fortunately, the influx of even more data has prompted many innovative software vendors such as PolySpot to develop information delivery solutions.
Megan Feil, November 20, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext.
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