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

since when did slashdot provide BS units?

[Fulcrum of Evil]

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.

Re:since when did slashdot provide BS units?

[clem.dickey]

Original article also compares a Peta of floating ops per *second* to an Exa of byte "processing and storing" per *day.* Journalism profs should save that article for class discussion.

Re:since when did slashdot provide BS units?

[TheRaven64]

Actually, it was a 1Gb memory stick, which is 128MB. If you are a geek, you deny the existence of any prefix containing 'ibi'.

Re:thousand million?

[afidel]

The long rule is stupid, if you are going to use units as big as a million million just use scientific notation.

Re:Hard disks "somewhat unreliable"?

[kalirion]

And I have an uncle who smoked a pack a day for 40 years and never got lung cancer.

Re:thousand million?

[ceoyoyo]

I guess you're joking, but in Canada one thousand million is definitely one billion, in english. It is not in french (it is a millard), but in that case you'd write the rest of the article in french too.

Bandwidth

[eccenthink]

So if I did my math correctly they're saying if they did distributed computing they'd need to transfer data at a rate of 92.5 Tbps.

I'm assuming a 1 Gb memory stick is actually 1 GB though...

Re:thousand million?

[Hurricane78]

Why not Just say 1E9 or even 1 * 10^9 for "a thousand million". If someone has a problem with understanding that, then what does he do on this site anyways? ^^
(Ok, actually everybody had this at school, so I can expect this to be a normal term, used on national television. But noo, they *could* lose the total retards by not using it. We can't have that!! :/)

Re:thousand million?

[TheRaven64]

Short billion is internationally understood too, and is the correct term for a thousand million. I've not seen a 1Gb memory stick for a while though, did the author mean 1GB? It's only a factor of eight difference, but it's important.