Beta News reports that IBM announced on Thursday that it had scored a breakthrough in file system technology that increases the speed of data access by seven times. Called the General Parallel File System (GPFS), the technology allows for high-speed access to files across multiple nodes of a Linux or AIX cluster. Researchers were able to attain a 102-gigabyte per second transfer rate on the ASC Purple supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in a recent test. The file system was an astonishing 1.6 petabytes (1 petabyte = 1024 terabytes, 1 terabyte = 1024 Gigabytes, 1 Gigabyte = ...you get it ?) in size, the largest ever in the world.

My laptop has 80 Gigabytes. Imagine transferring the content of the entire drive in less than a second!