Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder
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CSIRO's ASKAP antennas at the MRO in Western Australia. Credit: Ant Schinckel, CSIRO.
Posted on 04/02/2012 12:52:51 PM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
RESEARCH GIANT IBM will develop an exascale supercomputing cluster as part of a five year project with the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON).
IBM has announced it entered a €33m research project with ASTRON to build a low-power exascale supercomputer cluster that will sift through data collected by the international Square Kilometre Array (SKA). The SKA is expected to produce exabytes of data every day peering back through time to find the origin of the universe, which until recently many hacks believed to be at the bottom of a beer glass.
Ton Engbersen of IBM Research in Zurich said, "If you take the current global daily Internet traffic and multiply it by two, you are in the range of the data set that the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope will be collecting every day. This is Big Data Analytics to the extreme. With DOME we will embark on one of the most data intensive science projects ever planned, which will eventually have much broader applications beyond radio astronomy research."
The SKA itself isn't expected to come online until 2024, but building an exascale supercomputer cluster isn't a turnkey research project either. Although IBM bandied around data storage numbers the real challenge is not storage but power efficiency.
Intel has said exascale computing is one of its biggest challenges, and admitted that present designs need to be modified significantly for exascale clusters to become possible. While it is theoretically possible to simply increase the number of nodes based on current technology, cooling the nodes becomes prohibitive, meaning chip and interconnect designers have to create a low power design if they intend to break the exascale barrier. µ
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The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is a $3 billion international global science project being put together by a consortium of institutions from 20 different countries.
The SKA is a radio telescope that will help answer fundamental questions in physics and cosmology and provide scientists and the world with unparalleled insights into the formation and evolution of the Universe.
The SKA will either be built in Australia and New Zealand or Southern Africa, with this decision to be made around 2012.
The SKA will require new technology and progress in fundamental engineering in fields such as information and communication technology, high performance computing and production manufacturing techniques. It will comprise a vast array of antennas, arranged in clusters to be spread over 3,000 kilometres or more.
The antennas will be linked electronically to form one enormous telescope. The combination of unprecedented collecting area, versatility and sensitivity will make the SKA the world’s premier imaging and survey telescope over a wide range of radio frequencies, producing the sharpest pictures of the sky of any telescope.
The SKA is a collaboration between institutions in 20 countries, led by an international science and engineering committee and a jointly funded SKA Project Office. The cost of the telescope will be shared among the participating countries, with scientists from around the world working closely with industry partners to develop the technologies to design and build the instrument.
In December 2005 four countries (Australia, Argentina, China and South Africa) submitted proposals to the International SKA Steering Committee (ISSC) to host the SKA. On September 28, 2006 it was announced that Australia and Southern Africa had been short-listed as sites to host the SKA – the final decision is expected in 2012.
The Australian candidate site is located in the Mid West of Western Australia, within the Shire of Murchison. This region is one of the few places in the world today that is suitable in terms of its radio-quietness and its radio-astronomy observational qualities.
Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder
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CSIRO's ASKAP antennas at the MRO in Western Australia. Credit: Ant Schinckel, CSIRO.
Wonder how this differs from the VLR at Socorro, Nnew mexico?
Note the RR Tracks ...for repositioning the recepters.
What are you trying to do, make me think :) ..... I’m sort of in brain drain mode right now. However the mention of the bottom of a beer glass sort of caught my attention. I’ll read the article and links later on.
OK It is much bigger.
I went on a tour of the VLR in NM.
Their computing didn't seem like much...Must of been some Dec's somewhere,...but didn't see them on the Tour.
It is really Neat what they do though.
Those are trucks on the left side.
Antenna Assembly Building at VLA
Note the Rail Road Tracks....
That Giant array gets Moved....
Where did my pictures go?
Well the good large ones are still up...so far.
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One exaflop is a thousand petaflops.
Obama Threatens the unelected Supreme Court "
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Somebody should. Might as well be him.
Been reading up on this. An exaflop is a lot. Looks like the Indians are making a big investment in supercomputing. Anyways, this helped me. I didn't know the dif between my IOPS and my FLOPS:
Floating-point (real numbers). The encoding scheme for floating-point numbers is more complicated than for fixed-point (integers). The basic idea is the same as used in scientific notation, where a mantissa is multiplied by ten raised to some exponent. For instance, 5.4321 × 106, where 5.4321 is the mantissa and 6 is the exponent. Scientific notation is exceptional at representing very large and very small numbers. For example: 1.2 × 1050, the number of atoms in the earth, or 2.6 × 10−23, the distance a turtle crawls in one second compared to the diameter of our galaxy. Notice that numbers represented in scientific notation are normalized so that there is only a single nonzero digit left of the decimal point. This is achieved by adjusting the exponent as needed. Floating-point representation is similar to scientific notation, except everything is carried out in base two, rather than base ten. While several similar formats are in use, the most common is ANSI/IEEE Std. 754-1985. This standard defines the format for 32-bit numbers called single precision, as well as 64-bit numbers called double precision and longer numbers called extended precision (used for intermediate results). Floating-point representations can support a much wider range of values than fixed-point, with the ability to represent very small numbers and very large numbers.
Nice break from all the Trayvon Obama crap. Thanks.
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