Great news: a few weeks ago, we were awarded a ACM SIGCSE special projects grant to support the Blackbox project. We had applied for this grant to help pay for two servers that will be central to the project. One of them will collect the incoming data, and the other one will host a mirror of the database for researchers to work on and run queries and other evaluations.
We did some worst case calculations (worst case here meaning: close to 100% opt-in ratio of our users, which — in another sense — is really a best-case scenario). According to this we could have up to about 40 incoming network connections per second and generate about 3TB of data per year. That’s more that our current BlueJ server can handle. Way more.
So, thanks SIGCSE!