OzSTOC
No Parking Zone! => Off Topic, Off Colour, and non-motorcycle related => Topic started by: BigTed on November 03, 2015, 12:15:47 PM
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Related to the "computer hardware" topic started by Ken: http://ozstoc.com/index.php?topic=10132.0 (http://ozstoc.com/index.php?topic=10132.0)
I have an ex-colleage and close friend of mine who's been lucky enough to work on the Square Kilometre Array - a massive radio telescope being built across Australia and NZ, centred near Geraldton WA.... main site here: http://www.skatelescope.org/ (http://www.skatelescope.org/)
I've been looking into partnering in some R&D for my employer (IT) and as part of understanding the technology issues, my mate sent me the following interesting numbers about it. When SKA is fully operations (in about a decade), it will:
- Collect more radio data in the first 6 minutes of operation than has ever been collected before.
- Require a parallel computing environment equivalent to 100,000,000 PCs (~200 PFlops).
- Will produce network loads equivalent to 10-100 times today’s global internet traffic.
- Produce single multi-channel “images” of the sky each approximately 60-700 TBytes in size.
- Require storage of ~100 Pbytes (100,000 terrabytes) of science data per year.
- Require networks capable of 1000s of Gbps bandwidth between signal processing and computing environments.
- Be required to archive science data for at least 50 years.
Needless to say, much of the technology does event exist - yet, there are a lot of people hoping that Moore's Law holds true for some time yet.
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Sounds like it will need its own power station if all that data goes onto hard drives.
Of course it's SSDs now, with "bubble memory" (whatever that is) in development.
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Sounds like it will need its own power station if all that data goes onto hard drives.
Of course it's SSDs now, with "bubble memory" (whatever that is) in development.
Actually, I brought him in to Western Power when I was there as they needed a 5MW power station built in the middle of nowhere.... just to run the 5 yet-to-be-invented IBM super computers.
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By the time they are invented, there will be a laptop with more power a week later.
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By the time they are invented, there will be a laptop with more power a week later.
:rofl... probably true!