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SKA Telescope To Provide a Billion PCs Worth of Processing

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the scaling-up-scalability dept.

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)."

8 of 186 comments (clear)

  1. thousand million? by Lord+Ender · · Score: 4, Funny

    (about one thousand million 1Gb memory sticks each day)

    Could we get that in LoC's? Also, could we stick to the standard "one million thousands" unit, please?

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    1. Re:thousand million? by rubycodez · · Score: 4, Funny

      could we please stick to serious measures of information within the field of IT instead of silly printer paper units, how many station wagons full of 9 track tape is that?

    2. Re:thousand million? by Lord+Ender · · Score: 5, Funny

      Here's the way it works:

      In the US and the UK, the number is officially called "billion." In India, it's called "100 Crore." Australia officially has no idea how they do their numbers, and Canada doesn't even know what language it speaks. There are no other English-speaking countries of consequence.

      Therefore, "billion" is the most acceptable term for international English-language writing.

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  2. What? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    SKA telescope? Madness!

  3. Re:Ska? by colmore · · Score: 4, Funny

    Hey, IBM, you dropped your telescope.

    Someone should pick it up, pick it up, pick it up, pick it up.

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  4. Re:since when did slashdot provide BS units? by NoYob · · Score: 4, Funny

    Seriously, how is a PC a unit of processing ability? And one thousand million GB sticks is an Exabyte (hence the name). Perhaps you can just say 10^18 bytes. This is slashdot, not msnbc.

    Some of us went and got an MBA; upon which, it knocked tens of points off of our IQ.

    Now, 10 carrots 18? 18 what? Rabbits?

    It should read 10 carrots and 18 rabbits!

    And people say I'm stewped!

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  5. That was a lame way of putting the data numbers by MartinSchou · · Score: 5, Funny

    about one thousand million 1Gb memory sticks each day

    First of all, no one would be using manual storage to transfer the data.

    Just throw up some numbers that makes sense to us. Like 99,420.5393 gigabit/second.

    Most large ISPs use OC-192 as the backbones of their infrastructure. You'd need more than 10,200 of those to handle that data load, and that's ignoring the overhead.

    Or to put it into numbers that the RIAA can understand: 1.5707309 * 10^9 music CDs every single day.

    At 15 pieces of music per CD and $80,000/song that's $1.88 * 10^15 dollars/day flowing through that network. That's 632 times larger than the US federal budget for 2008.

    No wonder the music industry is in trouble!

  6. Re:Where are they going to store it all? by Pretzalzz · · Score: 4, Funny

    Maybe they could construct a really fast computer to process the data in real time so they wouldn't have to store it all. They might even release a press release about it.