Cooperman has not yet decided what type of storage or which vendor he will use. That will be determined after consultation with Northeastern's computer systems staffers and be finalized in proposals from four or five vendors this fall. But Cooperman said he is thinking in terms of at least 32 dual-processor computer nodes, with the majority of storage being lower-cost SATA drives and one to two terabytes being faster storage that can act as a cache for the slower disk, he said.

Other projects that will rely on the storage include using 10TB to 20TB for electronic message tracking to analyze the relationships between messages to improve security, looking for trends and indicators among many magnetic resonance imaging scans, analyzing computer viruses and setting up a "honeypot" computer to attract hackers in order to find patterns in their log-in processes.