Lorcan Dempsey posted some astounding numbers to his blog yesterday. Emphasis below is mine. Prepare to be amazed.

WorldCat in Your Pocket

“WorldCat is our union catalogue of about 56 million bibliographic records, which represent approximately a billion holdings. It is about 50 gigabytes in MARC Communications (100+ gigabytes in XML) format and about 23 gigabytes compressed.

OCLC Research recently acquired a 24-node (48-cpu) Beowulf cluster with 96 Gigabytes of memory. According to my colleague Thom Hickey, whose team has been working on the machine, the cluster speeds up most bibliographic processing by about a factor of 30. This means that what might have taken a minute now takes two seconds, what might have taken an hour takes two minutes, what might have taken a month takes a day. For jobs that will fit entirely in memory (e.g. a `grep' of WorldCat) avoiding disk i/o gives another factor of about 20, reducing 1-hour jobs down to 6 seconds. We can 'frbrize' WorldCat on the cluster in about an hour.

WorldCat is also now more mobile. Thom has a 40 gig iPod which can accommodate WorldCat on its disk with room left for 5,000 song tracks. Now, you can't do much with the data on the iPod, but you can certainly carry it around. Again, it takes about an hour to get it on and off the iPod.” [Lorcan Dempsey’s Weblog, via It’s All Good]

They’re all amazing numbers, but think about that iPod statement for a moment. What does it mean when a patron can carry around the whole, freaking WorldCat database? We’re not that far off from the introduction of the personal, mobile server in your pocket.