Related to the "computer hardware" topic started by Ken:
http://ozstoc.com/index.php?topic=10132.0I 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/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.
