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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)."

5 of 186 comments (clear)

  1. The race is on... by tjstork · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Come on... the moment IBM makes a computer with a billion cores, both Microsoft and Linux will be salivating at the change to get -something- to run on them. I mean, what's a GB sized array just to keep track of the CPUs. Pure insanity. Any real geek would love to tackle that.

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    This is my sig.
    1. Re:The race is on... by Nerdfest · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Wait until you see how IBM charges for it. If you think Microsoft has expensive licensing, you haven't worked closely enough with IBM.

  2. Re:Hard disks "somewhat unreliable"? by jandrese · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Anecdotal evidence is the best evidence!

    I have an 800MB HDD that still works, and up until a couple of years ago was in constant use. It was only retired because the old workhorse of a machine it was in was finally replaced. That said, I have also worked with big farms of disks and know that failures happen, and the hard drive is the second least reliable part of most computers after the fans. Anything with moving parts is going to eventually fail, there's no way around it.

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    I read the internet for the articles.
  3. Imagine a... by jedigeek · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Imagine a beowulf of those

    omglol!

  4. Oblig. by drunken_boxer777 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Where are the obligatory "beowulfcluster" tags and jokes already?

    Sheesh, the standards around here sure are slipping.