SA looks to the SKA
|Published
Dawn breaks over a radio telescope dish of the KAT-7 Array pointing skyward at the proposed South African site for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescope near Carnavon in the country's remote Northern Cape province in this picture taken May 18, 2012. South Africa is bidding against Australia to host the SKA, which will be the world's largest radio telescope when completed. Picture taken May 18, 2012. REUTERS/Mike Hutchings (SOUTH AFRICA - Tags: TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY) Dawn breaks over a radio telescope dish of the KAT-7 Array pointing skyward at the proposed South African site for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescope near Carnavon in the country's remote Northern Cape province in this picture taken May 18, 2012. South Africa is bidding against Australia to host the SKA, which will be the world's largest radio telescope when completed. Picture taken May 18, 2012. REUTERS/Mike Hutchings (SOUTH AFRICA - Tags: TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY)
Cape Town - A new global industry that involves the processing of huge amounts of computer-generated data is rapidly developing.
And there is no reason why South Africa should not be at its forefront – particularly because of its leading role in the international Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope project.
So says radio astronomer Bernie Fanaroff, project director of SKA South Africa, who spoke at a media briefing following the announcement of a major new four-year collaboration between computer giant IBM, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (Astron) and SKA-SA, called the Dome project.
This collaboration will involve research into extremely fast, but low-power, “exascale” computer systems, aimed at developing advanced technologies for handling the massive amount of data that will be produced by the SKA.
Exascale refers to computing at the level of an exaflop – a quintillion (10 to the power of 18) “floating point operations per second” – and that is still somewhere in the future, possibly around 2018. The world’s fastest computers currently operate at a speed of one petaflop, or one thousand times “slower”.
The Dome project aims to develop a develop a fundamental IT roadmap for the SKA. Among other research areas, SKA-SA scientists will look at signal processing and advanced computing algorithms for the capture, processing, and analysis of the SKA data so that clear images can be produced for astronomers to study.
Simon Ratcliffe, technical co-ordinator of Dome-SA, said the collaboration brought together “a dream team” of scientists and engineers and would help lay the foundation for solving other big data set challenges such as climate change, genetic information and personal medical data.
Fanaroff said the Dome collaboration was “very interesting” for South Africa for several reasons.
“One is that we’re very keen to encourage the big multinational hi-tech companies to establish real research capacity in South Africa, and we’re talking now about fundamental research, real ‘blue sky’ research.”
“… So that’s an industry that is going to become more and more important in the next decade, and there’s no reason why South Africa shouldn’t play a leading role,” he said.
Power of one 100m PCs
l The SKA will generate enough raw data to fill 15 million 64 GB iPods every day.
l The data collected by the SKA in a single day would take nearly two million years to play back on an iPod.
l The SKA central computer will have the processing power of about one hundred million PCs.
l The SKA will use enough optical fibre to wrap twice around the Earth.
l The dishes of the SKA will produce 10 times the global internet traffic.
l The aperture arrays in the SKA could produce more than 100 times the global internet traffic.
l The SKA supercomputer will perform 1 018 operations a second – equivalent to the number of stars in three million Milky Way galaxies – in order to process all the data that the SKA will produce.
l The SKA will be so sensitive that it will be able to detect an airport radar on a planet 50 light years away. - Cape Argus