HPCwire: Dishing Out the Data Deluge

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February 16, 2012

Dishing Out the Data Deluge

Robert Gelber

The International Center for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) has just announced a partnership with DataDirect Networks to handle the data to be generated by the newly proposed Square Kilometer Array (SKA), a giant radio telescope being built in the Southern Hemisphere. Wherever the SKA will ultimately be located, it will occupy one square kilometer of land (thus its name) and is expected to generate in excess of one exabyte of raw data each day.

The 3,000-plus-dish SKA comes with a $2 billion price tag and will be installed either in South Africa, Australia or New Zealand. Each country is vying for the installation, and not just for sake of prestige. One analysis of an SKA installation in Western Australia estimated a $100 million boon to the local economy. The location is expected to be decided during a SKA organization meeting this coming April, although the University of Western Australia has already started preparing for the telescope.

A new supercomputer cluster named “Fornax” was installed at the university for the purpose of processing the vast quantities of data produced by the SKA. The cluster consists of 96 nodes, each with a pair of six-core Xeon 5650 CPU’s, an NVIDIA Tesla C2050 GPU, and 48 GB of memory. In total, Fornax houses 1,152 CPU cores, 43,008 GPU cores and 4.6 TB of memory. Nodes are connected through an InfiniBand network.

As mentioned above, DataDirect Networks will be supplying the storage for the project. This is not the company’s first foray into radio telescope applications. The company is currently working on storage applications for the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA), to be completed in 2012, and the Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP), which is scheduled for deployment in 2013.

Construction of the new radio telescope is not expected to begin before 2016, but once complete, it is expected be more than 40 times as powerful as the world’s best telescope today and have the ability to look as far as 13 billion light years away. The significance of that, as explained by Professor Lister Staveley-Smith of the University of WA's School of Physics in a recent article in WA Today, is that scientists will be able to “see parts of the universe, especially the early universe, which have previously been inaccessible.”

This is not ICRAR’s only upcoming project. An agreement with international members of the science community from Europe and India has been made to create a new type of radio telescope called SKA-low. The most notable feature of the SKA-low, is radio antennas that function without any moving parts.

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