HPCwire: Forget Star Wars -- BlueGene Brightens Galaxy

The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing

HPCwire >> Off the Wire

May 27, 2005

Forget Star Wars -- BlueGene Brightens Galaxy

by Tim Curns, Editor

In a new experiment (LOPES), astrophysicists at the Netherlands Foundation for Research in Astronomy (ASTRON) have recorded the brightest and fastest radio blasts ever seen in the sky. Using a protype of a new high-tech radio telescope (LOFAR), along with IBM's BlueGene supercomputer, the researchers showed that the radio flashes are produced in the Earth's atmosphere by the impact of the most energetic particles produced in the cosmos. These particles are called ultra-high energy cosmic rays and their origin is an ongoing puzzle. The astrophysicists now hope that their finding will shed new light on the mystery of these particles.

The scientists used an array of radio antennas located within a field of particle detectors of the KASCADE Grande experiment at the Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe. They showed that whenever a very energetic cosmic particle hit the Earth atmosphere a corresponding radio pulse was recorded in the direction of the incoming particle. Using imaging techniques from radio astronomy, the group even produced digital film sequences of these events, yielding the fastest movies ever produced in radio astronomy. The particle detectors provided them with basic information about the incoming cosmic rays.

What does all of this really mean?

"By building ever larger telescopes we can detect and sense ever fainter radio signals, ever fainter means ever more distant, and because these signals travel the Universe at the speed of light, ever more distant means ever further back in time," said Dr. Eugene J. de Geus, ASTRON general affairs.

"LOFAR will be so sensitive, that we expect to detect signals from the period in the evolution of the universe when, after the big bang, the first stars or galaxies formed (this period is called the epoch of reionization). This will provide us with a very basic understanding of the physics of the early universe," he continued.

The use of the LOFAR system, he says, is not limited to just astrophysics. By linking sensors to complex models running on BlueGene, researchers will find more information on the geology of the subsurface, crop-growth, and meteorology, for example.

The radio telescope LOPES (LOFAR Prototype Station) uses prototype antennas of LOFAR to be built after 2006 in the Netherlands and parts of Germany. LOFAR has a radical new design, combining a multitude of cheap low-frequency antennas which collect the radio signals from the entire sky at once. Connected by high-speed internet, the BlueGene supercomputer then has the ability to detect unusual signals and make images of interesting regions on the sky without moving any mechanical structure.

Before teaming with IBM, the LOPES project team knew they needed an industry partner that could help them obtain very large processing power capabilities (27.5 Tflops) and accomodations for large sustained data input streams of 400 Gb/s.

"Futhermore, internally to the supercomputer, the amount of data being passed around explodes to 46 Tb/sec (i.e. 46 trillion complex calculations per second). The internal architecture of BlueGene is eminently suited to this purpose," said Eugène de Geus, ASTRON general affairs.

The researchers were able to show that the strength of the emitted radio signal was a direct measure of the cosmic ray energy. "It is amazing that with simple FM radio antennas we can measure the energy of some of the smallest particles coming from the cosmos" says ASTRON's Prof. Heino Falcke, who initiated and supervised the experiment. "If we would have sensitive radio eyes, we would see the sky sparkle with radio flashes", he adds.

The detection has been confirmed in part by a French group using the large radio telescope of the Paris observatory at Nançay. Historically, work on radio emission from cosmic rays was first done in the late 1960ies with the first claims of detections. However, no useful information could be extracted with the technology of these days, work ceased quickly, and the historic results came into question. The main shortcomings were the lack of imaging capabilities, the low time resolution, and the lack of a well-calibrated particle detector array. All of this has been overcome with the LOPES experiment.

de Gues feels that the project will open up a new field of HPC centered on "data-intensive" supercomputing or "streaming supercomputing." He believes that such coupled systems could become very wide-spread because they allow scientists to obtain a better undestanding of the environment.

As a next step, the astrophysicists want to use the upcoming LOFAR array in the Netherlands and Germany for cosmic ray research and install LOFAR-like radio antennas at the giant cosmic ray experiment "AUGER" in Argentina. The group hopes to use the new technique for detecting and understanding the nature of the highest energy cosmic rays and also detect the elusive ultra- high energy neutrinos.

Article Tools

Share Options

(Digg, Technorati, more)

Subscribe

Subscribe to HPCwire

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.

Join the Discussion

You must be a registered user in order to comment on HPCwire stories.

Members enjoy:

	Access to Special Content, including Podcasts, Webcasts, and Whitepapers and more!
	Ability to take an active role in the discussions that are shaping the HPC technology discipline!
	Special offers available only to HPCwire members!

Become a Registered User Today!

Registered Users Log in Here to Comment

Email Address:	Password (case sensitive)

Remember me	Forgot Password?

RSS Feeds

Feeds by Topic

Feeds by Industry

Feeds by Content Type

Feature Articles

The Week in Review

TACC's Ranger supercomputer celebrates its second year of enabling important research; Microsoft partners with NSF to bring cloud services to researchers; and NSF submits its fiscal year 2011 budget request. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
Read More...

NASA Looks to Move Science Apps Into the Cloud

It seems only natural that the US space agency would be casting its eyes toward the clouds. Sure enough, NASA is now looking to cloud computing to optimize the operation of the agency's IT infrastructure for some of its science codes. Like many commercial businesses and government organizations, NASA is being asked to do more computing with fewer datacenter resources.
Read More...

Thoughts, Observations, Beliefs & Opinions About the NSF Supercomputer Centers

There is no such thing as an NSF (Supercomputer) Center and there never has been. There should be. What there are, in the words of Ed Hayes, then comptroller of NSF, are "NSF ASSISTED Supercomputer Centers." This is a double edged sword.
Read More...

Read more HPCwire features...

Top Headlines

IBM Releases Energy Efficient Power7 System

Feb 09 | eWeek Europe | Company says new high-end servers will deliver "intelligent performance." Read more...

Inductive Coupling Packs Flash Drive in a Chip

Feb 09 | EE Times | Wireless technology promises energy-efficient chip-to-chip communication. Read more...

IBM, Microsoft Help Create Montana Supercomputer

Feb 08 | eWeek | A new kind of Rocky Mountain high. Read more...

AMD Aims for GPUs in Mainstream Servers Starting 2012

Feb 08 | Computerworld | Chip maker hopes to bring CPU-GPU processors to servers in two years. Read more...

Graphene Transistors That Work at Blistering Speeds

Feb 05 | Technology Review | IBM has created graphene transistors that leave silicon ones in the dust. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

Virtualization for Aggregation And The vSMP Architecture™

Jan 12 | | In-depth look at vSMP Foundation server virtualization technology, technical implementation, use cases and capabilities. The technical whitepaper provides an architectural overview and details on the three vSMP Foundation products: vSMP Foundation for SMP, vSMP Foundation for Cluster and vSMP Foundation for Cloud.

Copper Cable Technologies for High Performance Computing

Jan 18 | | This white paper discusses Gore’s copper cable assemblies, and how they continue to exceed the standards for providing reliable, cost-effective solutions for high-performance computer applications.

Appro Assists LLNL with Cluster Designed for Extreme Scale Visualization

Jan 11 | | LLNL is home to some of the fastest computers in the world. In 2012, LLNL expects to have the Sequoia supercomputing cluster operational with a projected performance of over 20 PFLOP/s. These systems will focus on strengthening the foundations of predictive simulation through running large suites of complex simulations and then comparing model predictions with experimental data. To visualize this project’s large amount of data, LLNL requested an Appro Supercomputing Cluster specifically designed to support interactive data analysis.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Webcast: Virtualized Data Center Roundtable

Join this online panel discussion for live Q&A with leading industry experts, analysts, and end-users to discuss the latest innovations, best practices, barriers to implementation, and measurable benefits of server virtualization with a particular focus on today's real world solutions.

Webcast: Watch SC09 Birds of a Feather Video: Scalable Fault-Tolerant HPC Supercomputers

Learn about scalable fault-tolerant architectures and examples of energy efficient and scalable supercomputing clusters using dual QDR InfiniBand to combine capacity computing with network failover capabilities with the help of programming languages such as MPI and a robust Linux cluster management package.

Webcast: High Performance Computing for a Smarter Planet

LIVE@SCO9: The IBM team discusses new innovations in hardware, software and services that help clients better understand their workloads and get insight from their R&D efforts. Technology demonstrations include the soon-to-be-released Power7 HPC processor, the DCS990 system with 2.4 petabytes of storage, the xCAT management tool, secure HPC cloud computing and more. Winners of two HPCwire Readers' and Editors’ Choice Awards! Take the IBM virtual tour at SC09 or more information go online to: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/sc09.html