Developing such an array is the goal of a group of MIT scientists and four storage vendors working on the Human Speechome Project, an MIT Media Lab venture looking to find out how babies develop the ability to talk.

The project began three months ago when MIT associate professor Deb Roy began using 14 microphones and 11 cameras mounted on ceilings throughout his house to record his baby boy's everyday life. The setup gives researchers a bird's-eye view of every room in the house.

The effort requires a massive storage-area network to archive and search what is expected to be 1.4 petabytes, or 1,400TB, of data compiled over the span of the three-year project. It is being built from commodity hardware and uses a 10 Gigabit Ethernet IP network for data transfer between the back-end SAN and hundreds of servers.

"I think here what we're seeing is the future of storage. This is a great marriage between industry and the academic world," said Frank Moss, director of the MIT Media Lab and former CEO of Tivoli Systems Inc., at a press conference last week at MIT.

When completed, the Human Speechome Project's computing infrastructure is expected to include more than 300 Hammer Z-Rack storage enclosures from Bell Microproducts Inc., about 3,000 Serial ATA hard disk drives from Seagate Technology LLC, and more than 100 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches and 400 blade processors from Marvell Technology Group Ltd.