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SKA Telescope Set To Generate More Data Than Current Net

Posted by timothy on from the recycle-the-bits-responsibly dept.

angry tapir writes "The forthcoming $2.1 billion Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope could generate more data per day than the entire internet when it comes online in 2020, according to the director of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), Professor Peter Quinn. SKA — which Australia with New Zealand and South Africa are competing to host, and which will help the search for Earth-like planets, alien life forms, dark matter and black holes — will be 10,000 times more powerful than any telescope currently used. Slashdot has previously discussed the proposal to use 'Skynet' — a grid-computing-based solution for processing and storage."

10 of 73 comments (clear)

  1. Re:finally we can retire that... by dwarfsoft · · Score: 4, Funny

    This is just Astronomical Porn. Rule 34 still holds true.

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    Cheers, Chris
  2. SKA and other astronomy projects by JoshuaZ · · Score: 2

    Given that we just had a Slashdot article about how the space based James Webb telescope is already on the ropes with Congress, http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/07/07/0038247/Congress-Dumps-James-Webb-Space-Telescope, perhaps we should be worried that the same will happen for SKA. Unlike Webb, SKA is an international project, so it won't necessarily go down the tubes if the US backs out. Moreover, the US has backed out of European lead science projects before often with very little warning. SKA is going to allow some very interesting work. Among other things, SKA might be able to detect extraterrestrial life, either through direct radio signals (from intelligent life) which would be a really big deal, or more indirectly detect non-intelligent through the analysis of extrasolar planets' atmospheres (such as the detection of large amounts of oxygen). SKA will also be used for many other astronomy and astrophysics projects, such as examination of supernovas. SKA is very good science, let's hope that the penny pinchers who repeatedly cut tiny science programs while leaving defense, social security and medicare alone will not touch it. In the long run, science helps everyone.

  3. Re:finally we can retire that... by SnarfQuest · · Score: 2

    How about: Imagine a beowulf cluster of these...

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    Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
  4. NBN by dakameleon · · Score: 3, Interesting

    (Warning: Australian content ahead!)

    I hope this lays down a water-tight case for the NBN going ahead - or the combination of the two being a catalyst for each other. If there's one thing this is good for demonstrating, it's that future data requirements will outgrow the current infrastructure very quickly, and a project which is as far-sighted as installing FTTH throughout the country has a justification for the unforeseen benefits it can help happen.

    (and bah humbug to anyone who thinks the SKA isn't justified to begin with!)

    --
    Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
  5. is this a good thing? by Charliemopps · · Score: 2

    If the CIA invented a device that listened into every phone call in the entire world, real time and dumped it all as a WAV file on a storage device in the basement, would that really do them any good at all?

  6. Sensationalistically inaccurate article... by Dahamma · · Score: 3, Informative

    The project is expected to deliver up to an exabyte a day of raw data, compressed to some 10 petabytes of data in images for storage.

    So, 10 petabytes of data - who cares about the raw source. I work for a video streaming company and we have several petabytes of H.264 video. If that were to be uncompressed into 30 FPS 1080p raw data, it would be 50-100x that, so already approaching a couple hundred petabytes. And think of all of the JPEGs out there - why don't we just uncompress all of those for the comparison as well?

    A (likely conservative) back of the hand calculation by Google estimated at least 5 exabytes accessible on the Internet (so even the wrong estimate is wrong). I'd imagine a huge percentage of that is compressed video, audio, and images. So, basically 5 exabytes vs 10 petabytes - it's off by 3 orders of magnitude.

    1. Re:Sensationalistically inaccurate article... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      Indeed ... while it's an impressive number, we already have experiments that generate more "raw data" per day than that: "CERN experiments generating one petabyte of data every second" http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/2081263/cern-experiments-generating-petabyte That's 84EB per day. But "all" of it is crap, and they eventually store only about 25PB per year.

    2. Re:Sensationalistically inaccurate article... by bertok · · Score: 2

      Your maths is quite a bit off.

      We have only 3 primary color channels (4 if you count rods separately, 5 if also counting tetrachromats), not "65000". We can't see 1 million different intensities simultaneously either -- while the human eye does have an enormous dynamic range, this adaptation takes a while (minutes). At any one time, we can see maybe 300-1000 distinct intensity levels per color channel. This only requires 10 bits to represent per channel. Even your 125 Mpixels is an exaggeration, because we have roughly 125 million sensor cells total, not 125 per color channel!

      This then works out to 125*10^6 cells * 10 bits * 30 Hz = 38 Gbps, which is a lot, but is almost 7 orders of magnitude less than your estimate!

      In practice, even 38 Gbps is overestimating things substantially -- the cells in the retina have a trade-off between temporal resolution ('framerate') and dynamic range, so we can't simultaneously get 10 bits of intensity detail and 30 Hz of temporal resolution. Additionally, the image on the retina isn't focused very well, reducing the actual image detail quite a bit, especially near the edge of our field of view.

      Whatever the real raw bandwidth is, the optic nerve transmits only about 8.75 Mbps per eye!

  7. Re:Ska by Hsien-Ko · · Score: 3, Funny

    Implying that there's depth in ska to use a telescope for that is. A reggae telescope would be better. Let's all get together and see deep space, mon.

  8. Re:Early processing of raw data by ceoyoyo · · Score: 2

    We know a decent amount about it. And we don't want to replicate it in our scientific instruments. The brain does all sorts of extrapolating, interpolating and other forms of making shit up. Which is great if you're a mammal who needs to see the sabre toothed tiger stalking you, but not so good if you're trying to get accurate, quantitative data out of a scientific instrument.