Supercomputer Becomes Massive Router For Global Radio Telescope

Nerval's Lobster writes "Astrophysicists at MIT and the Pawsey supercomputing center in Western Australia have discovered a whole new role for supercomputers working on big-data science projects: They've figured out how to turn a supercomputer into a router. (Make that a really, really big router.) The supercomputer in this case is a Cray Cascade system with a top performance of 0.3 petaflops — to be expanded to 1.2 petaflops in 2014 — running on a combination of Intel Ivy Bridge, Haswell and MIC processors. The machine, which is still being installed at the Pawsey Centre in Kensington, Western Australia and isn't scheduled to become operational until later this summer, had to go to work early after researchers switched on the world's most sensitive radio telescope June 9. The Murchison Widefield Array is a 2,000-antenna radio telescope located at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO) in Western Australia, built with the backing of universities in the U.S., Australia, India and New Zealand. Though it is the most powerful radio telescope in the world right now, it is only one-third of the Square Kilometer Array — a spread of low-frequency antennas that will be spread across a kilometer of territory in Australia and Southern Africa. It will be 50 times as sensitive as any other radio telescope and 10,000 times as quick to survey a patch of sky. By comparison, the Murchison Widefield Array is a tiny little thing stuck out as far in the middle of nowhere as Australian authorities could find to keep it as far away from terrestrial interference as possible. Tiny or not, the MWA can look farther into the past of the universe than any other human instrument to date. What it has found so far is data — lots and lots of data. More than 400 megabytes of data per second come from the array to the Murchison observatory, before being streamed across 500 miles of Australia's National Broadband Network to the Pawsey Centre, which gets rid of most of it as quickly as possible."

Comments

Raijin assists with other big data tasks.

[auric_dude]

As the appetite for super computing and associated use of big data expands as Raijin in brought online http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/21/australias_latest_top_super_fills_up_in_a_day/

What a bad summary.

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of waffling that tells me nothing about the premise. Why did they do it, why did they need to, what made that thing uniquely suitable so nothing else would do?

HEY EDITORS. DO YOUR JOB ALREADY, DAMMIT. STOP WASTING MY TIME.

400MB/s

[Thanshin]

More than 400 megabytes of data per second come from the array to the Murchison observatory, before being streamed across 500 miles of Australia's National Broadband Network to the Pawsey Centre

They forgot to mention the step where the 400 MB go to the NSA to be checked for signs of extra terrestrial terrorism.

Summer?

[mjwx]

I live in Western Australia and it's winter here.

Later "this summer" doesn't start until December.

500 miles

For those of us who dont use archaic measurements, it's 800 KM from the city of Perth, which makes it 800 KM from the closest city. If anyone is interested, here's the google maps link and it's distance to Perth, Western Australia.. There's literally nothing out there, picking up an AM radio station is difficult, making it the perfect place for a telescope.

If you truly want to get lost, you need to go somewhere like Murchison, no-one will find you. Of course just about everything there is trying to kill you, from King Brown snakes to Land Sharks and Koala Drop Bears.

Re:Summer?

[Javaman59]

I live in Western Australia and it's winter here.

I live in South Australia, and it's winter here, too.

Later "this summer" doesn't start until December.

I would say it does, because using seasons as a unit of time is a distinctly Northern hemisphere convention. In my observation, American's and Canadians are the main users of it (more than the British).

I often get confused talking to an American when they talk about doing something "in the summer", and it's not so much that they have a different summer, but that I'm not used to measuring time like this. (We only use it for things that are specifically related to the weather, such as sports).

In Australia we wouldn't say "later this winter", we'd just say "around August/September".

Re:400 Mb per seconds

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of it is noise you can throw away quickly. After that point it gets more and more difficult to choose so you need balance processing+storage+bandwidth
CERN ran into similar problems but at least they had a part of the science done on-site. (a week in geneva is way better than a week in the middle of the fucking desert)
Space people have kind of the opposite problem, since they have very limited on site storage/processing power and limitations in bandwidth/telemetry and they cant just dump more computers to solve the problem (rad hard electronics are not cheap and weight is counted in million$ up there). Usually the end result is bitter sacrifices of valuable data and bitter fights in the community on whose instrument will get to send back stuff.

Re:400 Mb per seconds

[the_other_chewey]

Most of it is noise you can throw away quickly.

In the case of the Square Kilometer Array (named for its total collection area by the way,
not because it is "spread across a kilometer of territory", whatever that's supposed to mean),
none of it is noise.

The SKA relies heavily on processing everything, using advanced phased-array
and other "inverse beam-forming" techniques to look at multiple targets in multiple
frequency ranges at once (the final design will have continuous coverage from
70 MHz to 30 GHz!).

This is only possible with centralised processing, so none of the antenna sites can throw
anything away: They don't know what will be important.

Misleading summary and first article

[amaurea]

The Square Kilometer Array will have a *collecting area* of one square kilometer. That means that if you add up the area of all the detectors, you get one square kilometer. Since there is some distance between each detector, the SKA will cover a ground area *much* larger than a square kilometer.

Part of the SKA will be built in the MRO-area in Australia. But it is far from finished - construction won't begin in earnest until 2016 I think. So the most powerful radio telescope in the world is not at MRO now. It is LOFAR in Europe.

Re:Misleading summary and first article

[ogre7299]

The article also washes over the fact that there are different telescopes for different parts of the radio spectrum. The MWA and LOFAR are the most powerful in the MHz regime, but the VLA is still the most powerful between 1 to 50 GHz, and ALMA is the most powerful from 85 and 700 GHz.

Re:Misleading summary and first article

[amaurea]

Right. And then there are the issues of resolution and survey area. Planck covers the same frequency range as ALMA, but measures the whole sky in total intensity and polarization, for example, and is much better at measuring the CMB than ALMA. So the term "powerful" is an over-simplification.

Petaflops

[Nedmud]

Well it sure can do a lot of floating point operations per second; how does that help for networking applications exactly?

Routing?

[mc1138]

So... anyone actually know more about the "routing" part of this. All I saw was that they turned it into a "really big router" whatever that means, and then talk about the array. I'm assuming they're using the super computer to actually make the decisions of who is getting what data in real time, and sending it to the correct place, but they don't really talk about that at all. Anyone have a better link?

Re:Routing?

[ebno-10db]

Good ol' Wikipedia has a decent description of the overall system: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murchison_Widefield_Array

An educated guess is describing it as a router is ridiculous. It's more like intelligently combining the M incoming data streams (beam forming) so that the data can be shipped at a lower bandwidth to N universities (each of which may be using a different combination of incoming data and hence looking at a different beam).

One of the nice things about phased array (electronically steered) antennas is that you can simultaneously receive signals from N "virtual antennas" (usually called beams in the business), each of which may be pointed in a different direction and have a different beam width, frequency and bandwidth. You create those N virtual antennas by combining the input signals from the M physical antennas in N different ways. The combined signals are of much lower bandwidth than the incoming signals. Hence you could have people at university A looking at one place in the sky, the people at university B simultaneously looking at a different place in the sky, and have both of them receiving real-time signals.