20 petabytes is this big ...

Apparently Google is now processing over 20 petabytes a day (www.niallkennedy.com/blog/2008/01/google-mapreduce-stats.html) . Hmmm, I have an 80GB drive, so let’s make that a round 100. Then that is the equivalent of 200 000 drives. Which means they are processing approx 2.3 of these drives a second, yikes?

Let say the above paragraph took you 10 seconds to process (… I like round numbers). That means you processed it at roughly 24 bytes / second. If this were a race and we let one byte = 1mm, then you travelled 24mm and the Google monster travelled 230 000 Km, about 36 times around the earth.