Two news items, the first on a cloud computing environment distributed over PCs contributing their available storage and computing capacity as a cost- and energy-efficient solution to processing an exabyte (1 billion gigabytes) a day of raw data; the second on a storage device thousands of times faster than hard drives.
Key players behind the Australian-New Zealand joint bid to host the $2.1 billion Square Kilometre Array radio telescope will launch a grid Cloud computing initiative by September with the aim of potentially harvesting the computing and storage power of desktops worldwide. The project is expected to deliver up to an exabyte a day of raw data, compressed to some ten petabytes of data in images for storage.
Researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) have developed Moneta, a phase-change memory (PCM) solid state storage device that is thousands of times faster than conventional hard drives and up to seven times faster than current solid-state drives (SSDs). 
The technology could be ready for market in a few years as improvements are made to the underlying phase-change system.
