A picture of Dr Geoff Garrett and Dr Megan Clark standing in front of the ultrahigh definition video wall.

CSIRO looks to the future with CSIROvision, its new ultrahigh definition video wall. Dr Megan Clark, incoming CSIRO Chief Executive attended today's CSIROvision launch along with current Chief Executive Dr Geoff Garrett. Dr Clark takes up her post with CSIRO in January.

CSIRO looks to the Petabyte Age

Reference: 08/222

CSIROvision, CSIRO’s new ultra high resolution visualisation system, is a window to a near future world where such huge volumes of information are generated that science itself will change, according to Dr Alex Zelinsky, CSIRO Group Executive, Information and Communication Sciences and Technologies.

2 December 2008

CSIROvision was launched today at CSIRO Discovery in Canberra by CSIRO Chief Executive, Dr Geoff Garrett.

Speaking at the launch, Dr Zelinsky said science was entering a new phase, where scientists moved from lab experiments to analysis of huge datasets.

“In the first six hours of operation of Australia’s astronomy project, the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) in 2012, this instrument will generate more information than the entire history of radio astronomy,” Dr Zelinsky said.

“The amount of information processed by ASKAP in one week will be greater than the number of human words ever spoken.

“Our data requirements are growing exponentially, and for this reason CSIRO is investing in infrastructure to address the challenges for petabyte science.”

Dr Alex Zelinsky, CSIRO ICT Centre

“The time has come - we are living in the petabyte age.”

A petabyte is equal to one million gigabytes, or a million billion bytes.

“Our data requirements are growing exponentially, and for this reason CSIRO is investing in infrastructure to address the challenges for petabyte science”, he said.

CSIROvision is based on and extends the OptIPortal technology developed by the University of California, San Diego.

“It allows us to see images that are over 100 million pixels in size”, Dr Zelinsky said.

CSIROvision will be used to communicate to the general public, as a collaboration system when linked with other optiportals, as a visualisation device for researchers and as a test bed for developing enhancements to the optiportal technology.

At today’s launch, CSIRO applications in the fields of climate change, health, water management and plant breeding were displayed.

Dr Zelinsky said in the next 18 months CSIRO will add over one petabyte of data storage. A petabyte is capable of storing 200,000 movies – equivalent to all the movies ever made.

Download images at: CSIRO looks to the Petabyte Age.

Read more media releases in our Media section.