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Rob Appleyard

    • About Me:

      I’m one of the IT people who lurk behind the scenes enabling all the amazing science to happen. I manage huge datastores that contain data from astronomers, particle physicists, climate researchers and more!

    • Read more

      Petabytes.

      It’s easy to lose track of the true size of the amounts of data we deal with every day of our lives. If you use computers or smartphones, you’ve probably heard of ‘megs’ and ‘gigs’, when talking about storage, connection speeds, and so on.

      The fundamental unit of data is a ‘byte’, which (traditionally) was the amount of data needed to store a single character.

      ‘Meg’ is short for ‘megabyte’, which is a million bytes. ‘Gig’ is short for ‘gigabyte’, which is a billion bytes. Even a megabyte is quite a lot of data, if you tried to write out one megabyte of characters with a pen and paper it would take you about 12 days. A song is about 10 megabytes, a DVD movie is about 3 gigabytes.

      My job is to look after much, much more data than that. A terabyte is 1000 gigabytes, and that’s about the amount of data that can be stored on a desktop computer.

      A petabyte is 1000 times bigger than that. My job is to look after more than 20 petabytes of data produced by the Large Hadron Collider, keep it safe, and make sure that any time a physicist is interested in any part of it, they can get it.

    • My Typical Day:

      Lots of meetings and tapping away at my computer, sadly.

    • What I'd do with the prize money:

      Help the Engineering Education Scheme students I’m working with fund a really cool project.

    CV

    • Education:

      Henry Box School,1994-2001. Durham University, 2001-2005. Open University 2007-2010

    • Qualifications:

      BSc from the Open University

    • Work History:

      Polyhedron Software, Codemasters

    • Current Job:

      Data storage for the Large Hadron Collider

    • My Interview

      • What did you want to be after you left school?

        I didn’t know. I studied physics because it seemed to be the thing to do, but I spent a long time figuring out what to do with it.

        Were you ever in trouble at school?

        A few times, but not often.

        Who is your favourite singer or band?

        Most listened to at the moment are Of Monsters and Men, Placebo, and a bunch of movie and game soundtracks.

        What's your favourite food?

        Nan bread, pizza or sushi. Not all at once…

        If you had 3 wishes for yourself what would they be? - be honest!

        Lifetime’s supply of pizza that didn’t make me fat, a trip into space, and 20 more wishes.