To handle the unprecedented—literally astronomical—amount of data expected from the world's largest radiotelescope when it becomes operational in 2024, IBM has teamed up with the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (Astron) in a five-year, $43 million collaboration to develop a computing architecture and data transfer links with a capacity that far exceeds current state-of-the-art technology. The project, called DOME, will be based in the Netherlands, at the newly established Astron & IBM Center for Exascale Technology.
The Square Kilometer Array (SKA) is expected to produce more than 1 exabyte (1 million terabytes) of data per day—an exabyte is about twice the daily traffic on the World Wide Web. The SKA, a $2.1 billion project, will be located in either Australia or South Africa. This survey telescope will be composed of thousands of small antennas forming a collection area equivalent to one square kilometer but spanning a huge surface area—approximately the width of the continental United States. The SKA will be 50 times more sensitive than any former radio device and more than 10,000 times faster than today's instruments.
Scientists from IBM and Astron—one of the key partners in the consortium developing the SKA—will investigate advanced accelerators and 3D stacked chips for more energy-efficient computing. They will also research novel optical interconnect technologies and nanophotonics to optimize large data transfers, as well as high-performance storage systems based on next-generation tape systems and phase-change memory technologies.
The SKA will be used to map the large-scale structure of the cosmos, study evolving galaxies, cosmic magnetic fields, dark matter, and conditions in the early universe before galaxies became visible. By studying pulsars, it may be able to determine whether Einstein's Theory of General Relativity holds up in regions of extremely curved space.
