Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in 2012, detailing IBM’s early collaboration with ASTRON to develop the massive computing infrastructure required for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA).
International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) collaborated with ASTRON (the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy) to create the world’s most powerful radio telescope and supercomputer system, which was designed to process twice as much information every day as the entire internet in a massive effort to unravel the origin of the universe.
Processing the Universe’s Data
Scheduled for completion in 2024, the computer architecture will be attached to a 1,900-square-mile array of telescope antennas built to explore evolving galaxies, dark matter, and the very origins of the universe dating back to more than 13 billion years.
Ton Engbersen of IBM Research stated, “If you take the current global daily internet traffic and multiply it by two, you are in the range of the data set that the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope will be collecting every single day.”
This extremely powerful survey telescope will have millions of individual antennas to constantly collect faint radio signals, forming a collective area equivalent to one square kilometre but spanning a huge overall surface area across the globe.
Low Frequency Arrays
These massive dishes will be closely complemented by low and medium frequency aperture arrays, which provide a remarkably large field of view and are fully capable of observing more than one part of the sky at exactly the same time.
The SKA will use a specific technology for its low-frequency array (LOFAR) which serves as a highly effective pathfinder telescope for the larger array. The complete SKA will be 50 times more sensitive than any former radio device in history and more than 10,000 times faster than the instruments available today.
Unprecedented Storage Needs
The SKA is heavily expected to produce a few Exabytes of raw data per day for a single beam per one square kilometre. After aggressively processing this data, the expectation is that between 300 and 1500 Petabytes of data will need to be permanently stored every single year.
In comparison, the approximately 15 Petabytes produced by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN per year of operation is approximately 10 to 100 times less than the envisioned computing capacity of the SKA project.
With its huge collection area, the telescope will comfortably show incredibly fine detail in distant galaxies, help meticulously test the theory of relativity by studying exciting and mysterious objects like massive black holes, and allow astronomers to learn much more about the early history of the universe.
The scientific community also believes that the SKA represents humanity’s best ever chance of finding out if there is indeed life beyond our solar system.
IBM’s Technological Innovations
To do this will require absolutely ground-breaking technology. The SKA’s 15-metre dishes, which will detect electromagnetic radiation emitted by distant objects in space, will be the most sensitive ever built, possessing the theoretical ability to easily detect an airport radar on a planet 50 light years away.
IBM was tasked to investigate using advanced 3D ‘stacks’ of computer chips to achieve the enormous computing power required by the Square Kilometre Array. It will be carried on enough optical fibre cable of such vast quantity that it could easily be wrapped twice around the world.
“We have to invent futuristic technology to look into the past,” said Ronald Luijten, IBM’s lead researcher on the project in Zurich, Switzerland. “The energy issue is becoming ubiquitous. We need fundamental new technologies to deal with the needs of the future data centres.”
“To detect the signals, you really need a good antenna,” Luijten said. “It would be the equivalent of 3 million TV antennae dishes.”
They will also look at highly novel optical interconnect technologies and nanophotonics to fully optimise large data transfers, as well as high-performance storage systems based on next-generation tape systems and entirely new phase-change memory technologies that operate with dramatically low power consumption.
The location of the huge telescope, which is to be scattered across 1,900 square miles of Earth’s surface, was ultimately split between Australia/New Zealand and South Africa, since those remote regions do not have a large amount of ambient radio pollution.
