LBNL Currents
July 14, 1995
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley,
California
Computing Zone features topics of interest to computer users at LBL. Send suggestions and comments to Mike Wooldridge at mawooldridge@lbl.gov.
Lab's census database has day of fame
By Jeffery Kahn, JBKahn@LBL.gov
The hottest lane on the Information Superhighway is the World Wide Web and one of the hottest spots on the Web is Glenn Davis' "Cool Site of the Day." Thousands rely on Davis' home page to point them to new and interesting information on the Web.
On June 21, Davis chose LBNL's "1990 U.S. Census LOOKUP" service as his Cool Site.
Deane Merrill of the Information and Computing Sciences Division (ICSD), who leads the team that put LOOKUP online, said his group had no advance notice of its day of fame. That morning, the group's Mark Durst and Mike Helm discovered that their computer had almost ground to a halt due to a tremendous surge in usage. Further investigation revealed the cause.
On an ordinary day, about 700 LOOKUP-related files are accessed on the LOOKUP server cedr.lbl.gov. By the end of the day on June 21, more than 18,000 LOOKUP-related files had been accessed on this server.
The number could have been even higher. However, at noon LBNL asked Davis to route some of the Cool Site traffic to two other LOOKUP servers, including one at the Bureau of the Census. The Lab's computers were completely swamped.
This was the first time a Web service at LBNL has been chosen as a "Cool Site." LOOKUP joins a select group of other designated sites that, in June, included LIFE, the World Wide Web Dating Game, Geek Chic, and Mud Connector.
LOOKUP, written by ICSD's Nathan Parker, is a Web-based interactive retrieval system for 1990 U.S. Census data. Since its creation in August 1994, it has been accessed by 43,000 users.
LOOKUP is part of ICSD's Comprehensive Epidemiologic Data Resource (CEDR) and Populations at Risk to Environmental Pollution (PAREP) projects. The underlying database is a collaborative project of LBNL, UC Berkeley, and the Bureau of the Census. With 300 CDs (150 gigabytes) online, it is the largest collection of U.S. Census and other geopolitical data on the Internet. Recently, the Census Bureau incorporated LOOKUP into the Web-based U.S. Gazetteer, which provides maps and detailed Census data for any part of the United States.
LOOKUP can be found on the World Wide Web at the address of http://cedr.lbl.gov/cdrom/doc/lookup_doc.html
Excerpt from
1995 article stored at:
http://www.lbl.gov/Publications/Currents/Archive/Jul-14-1995.html#RTFToC22
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February 2009
Deane Merrill
96 Beverly Road
Asheville NC 28805
828-505-0763
dwmerrill@charter.net
http://merrill.olm.net
1/30/09
dennie2:\\j:\dwmerrill\mdocs\cdrom\doc\Census_Lookup.docx (Word
2007)
dennie2:\\j:\dwmerrill\mdocs\cdrom\doc\Census_Lookup.htm (Web
document)
http://merrill.olm.net/cdrom/doc/Census_Lookup.htm (Web document)