Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
One big obstacle is, as with SETI, not merely gathering super-sensitive data, but processing all the data to identify E.T.'s air traffic control in trillions of other (natural) radio sources. Just because you're sensitive enough to tell whether a signal is present or absent *when you know exactly what to look for* doesn't mean you'll be able to identify previously unknown signals.
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.
Yeah, but you couldn't install Linux on it because as we all know Batman hates the Penguin!
Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
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!