Arstechnica:
The Square Kilometer Array, which has been proposed for either
South Africa or Australia and New Zealand, will be a massive
project comprising thousands of radio telescopes linked
together. Because of its size, it is expected to produce more
than one exabyte (1 billion gigabytes) of data every
dayâmdash;approximately twice the global daily
traffic of the internet. To meet the necessary computing power
and energy needs of the new telescope array, the Netherlands
Institute for Radio Astronomy and IBM
announced
today an initial €32.9 million ($43.6 million),
five-year collaboration to research extremely fast but
low-power exascale computer systems. Once completed, the
telescope array will be used to explore evolving galaxies, dark
matter, and the origins of the universe. But the advances in
computing technology that the project has sparked will benefit
more than just the field of astronomy.
