Fermilab Builds 500-Megapixel Camera

heyitsme writes "Fermilab, a U.S. Department of Energy research lab, is part of a collaboration on an experiment to measure the properties of dark energy. The Dark Energy Survey would measure the history of the expansion rate of the universe more precisely than ever before, using the largest camera ever built with Charge Coupled Devices (CCD). The 500 megapixel Dark Energy Camera (DECam) would be placed on an existing 4-meter telescope located in north-central Chile at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory's Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. The DECam together with the CTIO 4-meter telescope will allow for a survey of 15 percent of the sky to light levels faint enough to measure the colors of galaxies at redshift one."

Comments

Filesize?

[FSWKU]

I would hate to see how much space one frame from this thing takes up...

Re:Filesize?

[BWJones]

I have heard that some sites are planning a huge SneakerNet (or, rather, JumboNet? CessnaNet?) and hoping to fly out stacks of DAT tapes of the unreduced data back "home."

So, we here in academia are a bit spoiled in terms of bandwidth. However, companies and some in academics have to pay for lots of bits and bytes and are thus interested in costs to move these sorts of data. I was talking with Jim Gray a couple of weeks ago and he was telling me that a recent study revealed some of the true costs of moving lots of data. For instance: Lets say you are trying to move a terabyte of data from London to Los Angeles. It turns out it is cheaper (and faster) to put it on magnetic storage and fly it from London to Los Angeles than it is to try and move it over the Internet.

Nice piece of kit!

[Paul Townend]

The article mentions "The five-year DES hopes to generate about 100 terabytes of data" that will be released to the public at regular intervals....

This kit is probably one example of why the world needs more 92 Tbs routers; sharing the data generated by this baby will probably be a task not unlike that faced by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. You're going to have to have a really nice architecture and set of protocols to be able to efficiently pass around these images - possibly this is where Grid Technology comes in to play....

Of course, then you'll need something to actually process the images on! I guess Intel and AMD still have a rosy future ahead of them...

pixel size < cell size

[morcheeba]

If you're 6 feet tall and we use the long dimension of the image (240k pixels), that's 7.62 microns per pixel. A typical cell is 10 microns, so we've got a pretty detailed picture of you.