SKA Telescope To Provide a Billion PCs Worth of Processing

Sharky2009 writes "IBM is researching an exaflop machine with the processing power of about one billion PCs. The machine will be used to help process the Exabyte of data per day expected to flow off the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescope project. The company is also researching solid state storage technology called 'racetrack memory' which is much faster and denser than flash and may hold the secret to storing the data from the SKA. The story also says that the SKA is unlikely to use grid computing or a cloud-based approach to processing the telescope data due to challenge in transferring so much data (about one thousand million 1Gb memory sticks each day)."

Comments

Wrong problem

[T Murphy]

I'm glad that astronomy is helping to push the limits on computing, but you would hope there are more pressing problems to use record-breaking computer systems for. If astronomers and their sponsors are willing to pick up the tab, I wish them well, but I feel a lot of people that could be the ones paying for this computer research have their priorities in the wrong order.