€32m project to explore Square Kilometre Array data handling challenges
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Scientists from IBM and Astron – the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy – have embarked on the DOME project, a €32million five year project to develop exascale computing technology for use with the Square Kilometre Array (SKA).
The SKA is an international consortium to build the world's largest and most sensitive radio telescope. Scientists estimate the processing power required to operate the telescope will be equal to several millions of today's fastest computers. The DOME project will explore the technologies that will be needed in 2024 – when the SKA is planned to go live – in order to collect, store and analyse the data.
Ton Engbersen from IBM Research 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 SKA 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."
According to the project, new architectures will be needed to to handle the amount of data produced by the SKA's antenna systems. Specifically, DOME researchers will investigate advanced accelerators and 3d stacked chips, along with novel optical interconnect technologies and nanophotonics to optimise large data transfers. Other research themes include high performance storage systems based on next generation tape systems and phase change memory technologies.
The SKA is expected to produce a few exabytes of data per day for a single beam per one square kilometer. After processing this data, it is expected that up to 1500petabytes of data need to be stored per year.
In comparison, the large hadron collider at CERN generates approximately 15Pbyte per year.
Pictured is IBM scientist Ronald Luijten.
