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Software Telescope
An anonymous reader writes "The BBC News is running the story 'Pyramid power' probes universe which is about LOFAR's software telescope for radio astronomy. The heart of the system is a IBM Blue Gene which processes data from an array of simple pyramidal radio antennae. The array of antennae are also multitasking in the fields of geophysics and agriculture."
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Agile Artisans
I hope the people over at LOFAR have considered all the ramifications of Pyramid Power... ^_^
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
The real question is who designed these "pyramids"? It's obvious that our current society is not advanced enough for such a feat, so that leaves us three possibilities.
A) A past civilization capable of such feats.
B) A future version of our civilization with time travel.
C) Otherworldly visitors with hyperadvanced technology.
I fear we'll never quite understand this mystery.
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News for real nerds, stuff that actually matters.
When Lofar Meets Stella
350 KM Diameter Radio Telescope Array
I was talking to a professor in astronomy here and he mentioned about some of the conflicts between US and Europe regarding the plan. That is one of the reasons why US is also working on Square Kilometer Array. LOFAR imaging telescope are designed for the 10-240 MHz frequency range where as SKA will cover 0.15-20GHz or higher. Hopefully the two efforts will complement each other.
So where is the link to build my own radio telescope and supercomputer? Or do I have to wait until the next issue of Make comes out?
"It is also possible that weather monitoring will become so localised
_ ________ ______
and instantaneous that weather forecasting will become "now-casting".
I'm sorry but I don't need some remote sensor device using wi-fi telling
me that it is raining hail stones, the pain from the fractures to my
cranium will be more than enough.
Arash Partow
_________________________________________
Be one who knows what they don't know,
Instead of being one who knows not what they don't know,
Thinking they know everything about all things.
http://www.partow.net/
Arash Partow's Philosophy: Be a person who knows what they don't know, and not a person who doesn't know.
The article states that individual pyramidal radio antennae are all connected back over fiber to the main Blue Gene supercomputer (Stella). As the antennae are spread over 350km, I think this represents a pretty serious amount of infrastructure development. Making the data collected available for local commercial use seems to have been of real use to the local community, and I wonder if there are a lot more situations where remote sensor networks could be of aid.
Business Voyeur
Why do projects like this have to be done on supercomputers?
Technical points aside, one political reason for not going to distributed processing is this: some want their data bits to be strictly proprietary.
By distributing, there will be a chance that the distributed data bits would be compromised and captured by someone else (e.g., leading to scooping the cheif investigator). It's a long shot, I know, but that is something that the organization like this need to take into account.
This development highlights the ongoing replacement of specialized, engineered devices with general purpose CPU + software. So many things (car's carburetors, motor speed controls, printers, appliance controls, radios, etc.) were formerly designed using mechanical and electrical circuits that implemented the needed functionality. Now they do it with a CPU such as an embedded controller and a bit of code in flash-RAM.
/. cliche, but I, for one, welcome our new software-embodied overlords.
The shift from hardware-embodied functionality to software-embodied functionality is very profound because of the differences in cost structures. The cost of complexity for software is far lower than the corresponding cost of complexity for hardware. The cost of manufacturing for software is lower than the cost of manufacturing for hardware. The cost of modifying or upgrading software is far lower than the cost of replacing or upgrading hardware. Products with software-embodied functionality can be designed at low cost, made in volume at lost cost and changed at will after sale. The result is greater variety and faster development of new products.
The effects go much farther than cost and variety. Perhaps the most interesting effect is that caused by Moore's law. Whereas mechanical and electronic system have not improved much in the last few decades, CPUs have. Creating software-embodied systems means that the device's performance can become slaved to Moore's law -- a software-embodied product gets a free performance boost with every doubling of transistor count/clockspeed.
I apologize for using this
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
To bad that the author didn't use a dutch spell checker; Gonungen should be Groningen, a university that has an produced impressive array of Astronomers such as Maarten Schmidt (identified the first Quasar), Bart Bok (established Siding Springs in Australia), Jan Oort (Proposed the 'Oort Cloud' of comets),All of these were tought by Jacobus Cornelius Capteyn, whole calculated the mass of the Milky Way Galaxy.
You never catch me alive
And for the winner, IBM drops in a team to make it happen.
So, what do you want to do, and how do you propose to do it ?
One of my friends/acquaintances, Heino Falcke, works for LOFAR. I was with him at a meeting in Italy in May and got the inside scoop on a lot of things...but it was so far out I'm afraid I didn't assimilate a whole lot of the details. I've used the VLA and published a few radio-based papers, but I'm far from an expert. Definiately a revolutionary, technology-pushing system sure to produce some great science.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
I believe the most powerful supercomputer in Europe is in Spain rather than the Netherlands as mentioned on th BBC website.
You are right, according to this list the Barcelona Supercomputer is slightly faster. This hurts my dutch pride.
The antennas are pyramid shaped because each of those pyramids actually contains two dipole antennas, to capture the EM field in two perpendicular polarisations. (I am involved in the project so trust me on this one ;-))
There is indeed a box for gathering all the data and sending it over to Groningen. It's basically a EM shielded container (see http://www.otvi.nl/gallery/plantdag_1/img_0124 )
I did my Master Thesis work at IRFU (Institute for Space Physics in Uppsala) with LOIS (LOFAR Outrigger in Scandinavia) and may be able to shed some light.
The antennas (or aerials) need not necessarily be pyramid shaped. A multitude of shapes exist. The two antenna elements are mounted orthogonally and allow two vector components of the signal to be retrieved. The LOIS antennas go a step further and have three elements, also mounted orthogonally. This means that not only can it decode AM and FM signals, but also phase and polarisation modulated signals. The last one is specially interesting, since polarisation modulation isn't bandwidth limited.
What's even more cool with the system is that it's entirely digital; the signals are demodulated using folding distortion. This means that there isn't any (theoretical) lower limit to the carrier wave frequency, which opens up new possibilities for studying background radiation.
The 10 Gb lines are not just for show. The output from each antenna system can easily use up all that bandwidth, and presently does so. And since the resolution of a cluster depends on the number of antennas, it's all about computing power.
Adventure, Romance, MAD SCIENCE!