Big Blue Designing Chip to Decode the Big Bang

Jerry Beth writes "IBM is working with European astronomy organization Astron to design a chip that will be used to help gather billions-of-years-old radio signals from deep space in the hopes of learning more about the origins of the universe. From the article: 'It's part of Astron's Square Kilometer Array (SKA) radio telescope project. The SKA will be linked to millions of antennas collecting radio signals from space. The antennas will be spread over a large surface area of the globe but, in the aggregate, they will form a square kilometer's worth of collection area. [...] The microprocessors will essentially help the antennas capture the signals, filter out extraneous data and then convert the signals into data. Astrophysicists will then analyze the data to look for patterns. The weakest signals are the prize in this project, because they will be the oldest.'"

Comments

They will call it..

[_PimpDaddy7_]

Black and Blue

Thank you, exit to the right, have a great evening ;)

Side jobs

[LiquidCoooled]

Could this be used to decode and filter out the content on myspace and find intelligent life?

Re:Big Bang Question

[__aaclcg7560]

Which one? The Anonymous Coward family is HUGE!

Most over-desgined chip ever

[Anonymous Coward]

Millions of transistors for a chip that contains a single read-only register that contains the number 42.

42

[hansamurai]

They should just call it Deep Thought and get back to us in 7.5 million years.

A better headline

[Chemisor]

Big Blue Building a Baffling, Buggy, and Bloated Behemoth Befitting Betterment of the Big Bang theories.