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IBM Designing Superman Servers For World's Largest Telescope
Nerval's Lobster writes "How's this for a daunting task? By 2017, IBM must develop low-power microservers that can handle 10 times the traffic of today's Internet — and resist blowing desert sands, to boot. Sound impossible? Hopefully not. Those are the design parameters of the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) Project, the world's largest radio telescope, located in South Africa and Australia amid some of the world's most rugged terrain. It will be up to the SKA-specific business unit of South Africa's National Research Foundation, IBM, and ASTON (also known as the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy) to jointly design the servers. Scientists from all three organizations will collaborate remotely and at the newly established ASTRON & IBM Center for Exascale Technology in Drenthe, the Netherlands. By peering into the furthest regions of space, the SKA project hopes to glimpse 'back in time,' where the radio waves from some of the earliest moments of the universe — before stars were formed — are still detectable. The hardware is powerful enough to pick up an airport radar on a planet 50 light-years away, according to the SKA team."
Is internet traffic really only 26 Petabytes a month, while that is a big number it sounds awefully low to me as the place I work does 15 Terabytes a month and they are little more than a miniscule pimple on face of the internet.
Wow! How is this possible given that the intensity of radio waves diminish at a factor equal to the square of the distance? That's some powerful radar or a darned big capture area of the antenna here on earth. How is it distinguishable from CBR.
they'll just do what they did with NCSA and decide they can't make money doing it and walk away.
can handle 10 times the traffic of today's Internet
Yeah, you can get something on the front page of slashdot if you use stupid, misleading metrics like this. Soulskill has his head buried in the sand.
A single computer, probably not.
Otherwise, the entire SKA will indeed produce 10 times the amount of data trafficking the today's internet.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Is this the machine that lets us see our lives 9 months in the future?
From the Wikipedia entry:
"Suitable sites for the SKA telescope need to be in unpopulated areas with guaranteed very low levels of man-made radio interference. Four sites were initially proposed in South Africa, Australia, Argentina and China.[16] After considerable site evaluation surveys, Argentina and China were dropped and the other two sites were shortlisted (with New Zealand joining the Australian bid, and 8 other African countries joining the South African bid):"
True, but that's getting pretty common in large-scale scientific applications these days. The LHC generates about 100 terabytes per second, for example. The numbers on the page you linked say SKA will generate "enough raw data to fill 15 million 64 GB iPods every day", which is actually an order of magnitude lower: 15 million * 64 GB = 960 PB per day. Divide that by 86400 seconds in a day, and you get about 11 TB/s.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The impressive part of the blurb to me was the ability to detect something like an airport radar on a planet 50 light-years away. With that sensitivity I would think this could go a long way towards SETI, nevermind background radiation.
Namaste
Government masters who by their nature violate ZAP are equally evil no matter the color of their skin.
True, but that's getting pretty common in large-scale scientific applications these days. The LHC generates about 100 terabytes per second, for example. The numbers on the page you linked say SKA will generate "enough raw data to fill 15 million 64 GB iPods every day", which is actually an order of magnitude lower: 15 million * 64 GB = 960 PB per day. Divide that by 86400 seconds in a day, and you get about 11 TB/s.
While LHC generates 10 times more data in a single experiment (usually scheduled months or years ahead), think that SKA will generate data each day every day.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
The LHC only records about 25 PB a year though, as the raw data is heavily filtered by custom hardware before getting to the more off the shelf computers that record data for later use. SKA on the other hand, needs to hold on to raw data for a couple hours until a run is complete, requiring intermediate storage of data of about a PB an hour, which will then get reduced to about a 1-5 PB a day for longer term storage and analysis. The intermediate data will use conventional hardware for processing, but even ignoring that, the long term data, that which needs to be stored and distributed, will out pace LHC's year' production in about a eek. If you wanted a more apples-to-apples comparison to LHC's raw data collection, you would need to look more at the amount of raw data produced before filtered down to commodity computer hardware. And with a final goal of thousands of antennas collecting up to 30 GHz signals across nearly the full spectrum, that is a lot more than the 10 terabits/s LHC roughly generates, and the intermediate 1 PB/hr data for SKA is much more than LHC's intermediate ~ 1 TB/hr.
Interesting numbers; thanks for the clarification! I agree that's a significantly more ambitious goal by some of those metrics. A PB/hour is indeed quite a lot of intermediate storage, and even the reduced 1-5 PB/day is more than any existing experiment.
I realize it's a lot to ask for popular science journalism, but that's one reason I'd like more specifics and precision in some of these stories. What do we mean by data being generated: where is it generated, how long is it stored for, what are its characteristics, etc. And ideally figures in units of bytes (or a multiple) rather than "iPods" or "internets" would be nice; it was sort of ridiculous that I had to multiply out what 15 million 64GB iPods hold to arrive at a real number (and even that number could be wrong if they really meant GiB rather than GB, though the actual iPod space is indeed in GB).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
ASTRON is the organisation that is also running LOFAR, which is basically a smaller version of SKA in a different frequency range. It is an interferometric array which requires a central system to process all the signals into one result. LOFAR is using a lot of dedicated hardware and a IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer for this purpose. Because all the signals are digitized at the receivers, this result is a very large stream of data, which are processed (but not stored) by a pipe-line of processors, each combining more and more signals, into one final image.
Why not build a monster one in space instead? Think space elevator please.
Take the Red Pill.
I'll pick a Batman server over a Superman server every time.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Hmmm. Sounds like a marvelous database for us SDR freaks to troll through, big chunks of spectrum at a time, eyes on the waterfall and spectral displays.
All ya need to do is create a server that will supply a file that is a chunk-o-spectrum as baseband IQ data, and you'll likely have a whole bunch of eyes on it for you. You'd certainly have mine!
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I think they've used a low estimate for the SKA. SKA phase I consists of three parts: a single-pixel dish array in South Africa, a focal-plane-array dish array in Australia, and an aperture-array tile array in Australia. The second part, with the focal plane arrays, is about twice the size of the precursor instrument ASKAP. The data rate for ASKAP is:
(36 antennas) * (192 elements per antenna) * (384 MHz bandwidth) * (factor of 2 to get the Nyquist rate) * (1 byte/sample) = 5.3 TB/s
So data rate for one of three parts of SKA phase I will have a data rate of twice this, or about the 11 TB/s you calculated. SKA phase II will be a lot bigger, probably exceeding the LHC's 100 TB/s.
So they’ll be putting the servers indoors then?
What's ironic is that 15 million iPods is no more relatable than saying 960 Petabytes. What do you imagine a pile of 15million iPods looks like? Or is it 15million retail boxes stacked in neat rectangular prisms? Or is it 15 million iPods laid end to end? Big numbers need to be expressed in ways that are easily divisible into realistic chunks people can hold in their heads. I have no idea what kind of volume this many iPods takes up, or how expensive it would be, I doubt anyone really does off the top of their head.
Hectice, baby, Mercator says hello to you
Since when did "Superman" become a good adjective for describing powerful computer systems? I mean, if you must appeal to the hardcore comic book reading geek, wouldn't Brainiac be a better choice?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
How many olympic sized swimming pools can be filled with the servers?
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
This link is a really interesting info on some of the SKA signal processing.
The SAK's power budget is 58MW for signal processing - this is such a high running cost that by spending 30 Million Euro on developing a few custom ASICs to halve that power usage will pay off in 9 months!
Maybe then we'll be able to see Apollo mission hardware on the moon :|