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New Zealand Joins Aussie Bid For Vast Radio Telescope Array

Posted by timothy on from the was-in-the-neighborhood dept.

schliz writes "A radio telescope in New Zealand has joined five in Australia to challenge Southern Africa to host the international Square Kilometer Array (SKA) in 2012. The newly connected telescope in Warkworth, New Zealand (PDF), is connected to an Australian data processing facility via a 1 Gbps network. Each telescope reportedly produces up to 1 Tb of data per hour of observation. IBM expects the whole of the SKA to produce an exabyte of data per day."

10 of 60 comments (clear)

  1. "Square Kilometer Array" by ScaryMonkey · · Score: 5, Funny

    Gotta love the creativity that goes into these names. Too bad they stopped with the previous naming pattern, I was waiting for the "Fucking Enormously Huge Array".

    1. Re:"Square Kilometer Array" by Shakrai · · Score: 5, Informative

      I'd like a Beowulf cluster of those ;)

      Already, the telescope network has been used to image the heart of a galaxy called Centaurus A, which is 14 million light-years away and contains a supermassive black hole.

      Observing the galaxy for ten hours, each of the six telescopes recorded up to 10 Tb of data. This was transmitted to Perth's Curtin University of Technology via KAREN and the 10 Gbps AARNET.

      At Curtin, the data was processed on a local 160-core Beowulf cluster comprising a 100 Tb spinning disk and supported by petabyte storage at the iVEC supercomputing centre.

      The cluster consolidated and processed the data into a final data set a "few" gigabytes in size, according to Curtin professor Steven Tingay.

      --
      I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
      We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
  2. So, what? by Frans+Faase · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I do not understand what is so interesting about this. Another dish added to various international VLBI networks. There is also one such dish near Urumqi in China in a very remote area. There are so many of these kind of dishes around the world. Even here in the Netherlands we have one. But we also have LOFAR, which is also capable of producing large amounts of data everyday. This kind of systems usually only operate for short periodes and the data produced are immediately processed and only the results are stored.

    1. Re:So, what? by Frans+Faase · · Score: 3, Informative

      For your information, the LOFAR system also processes data immediately. All the stations are connected with 10Gbit networks to the central processing system in Groningen.

      Each LOFAR antenna produces 0.8 Gbyte of data per second. When finallized, the system will consist of about 7000 antenna spread out over about 40 field most of which are in the Netherlands, but about ten of them will be abroad. I understand that each field will perform some preprocessing before the data is send to the central processing unit where it is correlated and further reduced before it being stored and made available for off-line processing. See here for a detailed description.

    2. Re:So, what? by RogerWilco · · Score: 4, Informative

      Well, that's partially true. The online/realtime processing doesn't store the data. We have the data coming in at about 150 Gbit/s into the BlueGene supercomputer (34 TFlop), which does initial realtime processing and writes resulting files at about 50 Gbit/s on a roughly 1 Petabyte intermediate storage system for offline processing. From there it gets initial processing/calibration and a factor of 16 to 64 reduction in size on the offline processing cluster (about 200 8core machines). Also some inspection of the data is done for quality assessment, and sky images are made. If the quality is good, the resulting data and images are moved to out 4+ Petabyte long term archive, where further processing can also be done to achieve publication ready results.
      On average we are expected to be producing about 20 TB/hour raw data, and about 700 GB/hour data that gets archived (life time of more than a week).

      As I speak we are 2 weeks away from the system being opened by the Dutch Queen, and we are operating on about half the above numbers with about 25 antenna fields online. By the end of 2010 we should be operating at full strength. Also, those numbers are from the top of my head, so I might be off a bit here and there.

      LOFAR is seen as a precursor to SKA, the first of a new generation of telescopes based much more on software and firmware and cheap off the shelve instead of expensive dishes and custom DSP hardware. After the various VLBI efforts (Including JIVE, which is housed in the same building as ASTRON and LOFAR), LOFAR now is the biggest telescope on Earth.
      http://www.astron.nl/dailyimage/main.php?date=20100421
      http://www.astron.nl/dailyimage/main.php?date=20100125

      There are some rather nice images starting to come out of the system, if you're a radioastronomer, but most are under embargo until the opening. I can show you this older image:
      http://www.astron.nl/dailyimage/main.php?date=20100208

      When mentioning SKA precursors, it's also noteworthy to mention that the 14 25meter dish WSRT array will be upgraded with focal plane arrays over the next two years, and the EMBRACE test bed has almost finished building it's first three stations.
      http://www.astron.nl/dailyimage/main.php?date=20070801
      http://www.astron.nl/dailyimage/main.php?date=20091012

      --
      RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
  3. It's nice to have a real time link for this work by NixieBunny · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I work on millimeter- and submillmeter-wave frequency radio telescopes in Arizona that occasionally do VLBI runs at 1.3mm (230 GHz). We don't have anything like a 1Gbps data link; it's more like 10 Mbps. It's hard to get the phone company to install a fiber cable run up a mountain.

    Our VLBI data are stored on hard disks at a rate of ~1 Gbps, then correlated later on some big computer back east. We have to wait days to learn if interference fringes were detected!

    --
    The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
  4. Re:It's nice to have a real time link for this wor by NixieBunny · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It's all politics. There's the environmental impact problem. The folks who arranged for our underground power line really screwed up by not putting a fiber in the same trench; now it's virtually impossible to get the Forest Service to permit additional work. Four words: Mount Graham Red Squirrels!

    --
    The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
  5. Is this really a good idea? by CuteSteveJobs · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Think twice, New Zealand. If the aliens start beaming you back porn, then Australia will have to filter your radio telescopes.

    1. Re:Is this really a good idea? by seanvaandering · · Score: 3, Funny

      Just as long as the porn is not of women with small tits... that would be illegal

  6. Re:It's nice to have a real time link for this wor by Thanshin · · Score: 3, Funny

    now it's virtually impossible to get the Forest Service to permit additional work.

    - Buy the fiber roll.
      - Throw some green and brown paing buckets over it.
      - Before it dries, throw in little branches, leaves, and red squirrels.
      - Buy a ninja costume, a shovel and a pair of night vision goggles.
      - Every night, go to the forest, lay out some meters of underground fiber and hide the camo roll.

    If someone finds you, dressed as a splinter cell ninja, carrying a shovel and an oversized rotten donut, you can make a deal: if he finds out what's your PhD on, you give him $5k, if he doesn't, he leaves you alone.