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New Supercomputer Boosts Aussie SKA Telescope Bid
angry tapir writes "Australian academic supercomputing consortium iVEC has acquired another major supercomputer, Fornax, to be based at the University of Western Australia, to further the country's ability to conduct data-intensive research. The SGI GPU-based system, also known as iVEC@UWA, is made up of 96 nodes, each containing two 6-core Intel Xeon X5650 CPUs, an NVIDIA Tesla C2050 GPU, 48 GB RAM and 7TB of storage. All up, the system has 1152 cores, 96 GPUs and an additional dedicated 500TB fabric attached storage-based global filesystem. The system is a boost to the Australian-NZ bid to host the Square Kilometer Array radio telescope."
Well, that's my Christmas list sorted - and it's only September :-)
And still it can't run Crysis...
I write professional videogame reviews! http://www.digitallydownloaded.net/
should we put another GPU on the barbie for them?
This machine is tiny compared to at least one other open supercomputer in Australia, the Vayu cluster at the National Computing Infrastructure's NAtional Facility in Canberra, which has a bit less than 12,000 cores, several petabytes of storage (tape and disk), and I believe some GPU's attached (the Xe system at the NCI NF has 16 Fermi cards).
In the scheme of things, this probably won't help the bid much at all given its small size (and the truly astronomical amount of data the SKA will produce). But that said, it can't hurt. As someone who hopes to one day work on the compute infrastructure and systems show Australia get the SKA, I do hope very strongly that we do win the bid.
It is funny that nobody ever talks about who is actually building the telescope parts, nevermind where it will be installed. It seems that Tellumat in South Africa is building the low noise receivers, but who is making the rest of the kit?
As a South African, I really hope that we're able to have the SKA Telescope here. The problem is, that the bandwidth issue is still a major issue, and providing the infrastructure to it in a remote area seems like a bit of a problem, especially considering that in the last report I read on it, that Telkom (the monopoly that keeps us constrained from really getting any decent level of Internet technologies at a reasonable price).
Of course, this is where a third party should step up to provide the infrastructure (since there's going to be a lot of GB's of data coming from there on a daily basis) and will obviously provide some much wanted media attention to said company... And of course yet again show how much Telkom is really ripping off the people that helped create the company that it is (since part of the infrastructure was paid for by our taxes, way back when - and since its a multi-billion Rand profit operation, I'm sure they could really afford to lower the prices to something reasonable instead of just simply ripping us off).
I guess it would also help if we stopped investing in building our own, failing satellites (and paying large sums of money to get them into space, again thanks largely to the tax payer) and invested in things that really matter (housing, electricity [which keeps going up and up, even though its Eskom's fault / government for failing to predict the usage requirements and not meeting adequate demand], water, and job creation) instead of wasting money on things that aren't really that important to us in the end.
But the SKA will at least be an impressive scientific feat that helps the global community (rather than just our nation), so I'm all for it!
Considering that the distance between 2 or more synchronized antennae becomes part of the radio telescope itself, the RadioAstron gives me chills just thinking about it, some astonishing science should come out of this bad boy.
Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty
I'm waiting for the newer model. It'z da Reggae Telescope, mon!
I can be moderated as Inciteful...
This is totally one step beyond! It's madness!
In other words, their new "supercomputer" still brings less to the table than all but the smallest of BOINC projects.
While space based VLBI is certainly cool, and some of the components in RadioAstron were developed at my company, it doesn't compare to the SKA.
The RadioAstron has a 10 m antenna, so about 75 m2 collecting area. The SKA will have a of about 1000000 m2. (square kilometer). The baselines will be up to 6-7000 km long in some possible variants, compared to the 189000km of the Radioastron.
So the spacial resolution might be a bit smaller (7000/189000 = 0.037), but the sensitivity is much lower (75/1000000=0.000075)
And that doesn't take into account that you can have a much larger data connection to a groundbased system, increasing the resolution in time and/or frequency, and the bandwidth you can observe.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
The BlueGene Stella at LOFAR central processing currently does 37 TFLops, which is about the same as this new Fornax system the article mentions (40 TFlops).
The Stella was a big computer in 2005 in http://science.slashdot.org/story/05/05/01/2316248/When-Lofar-Meets-Stella
Not so impressive in 2011.
It's the difference between being #6 on the supercomputer top 500, or not even making it.
And while LOFAR is running several other clusters besides the Stella, and manages to handle 200 GB/s, SKA is supposed to handle 15 TB/s or more.
In other words, this is a nice computer, but a toy compared to what SKA will need.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
it's a cumulative square kilometre of dish, not a square kilometre of dishes