When Lofar Meets Stella 123
Roland Piquepaille writes "The LOFAR (Low Frequency Array) telescope is a new IT radio-telescope which will use about 20,000 simple radio antennae when it's completed in 2008. At this time, it will cover an area with a diameter of 360 kilometers centered over the Netherlands. Its small radio antennae will detect radio wavelengths up to 30 meters, and because the ionosphere can bend some of these radio waves, the Lofar images might be somewhat blurry. So all the information captured by these antennae will be digitized and sent to a computing facility at a rate of 22 terabits/second today, and almost 50 terabits/second in 2010. This is the reason why Lofar needs Stella, an IBM supercomputer installed recently in Groningen, also in the Netherlands, to process signals from up to 13 billion light years from Earth. Stella consists of 12,000 PowerPC microprocessors and has a computing power of 27.4 teraflops. This overview contains more details and a picture about the Lofar-Stella interaction."
When Roland meets Slashdot... (Score:3, Insightful)
P.S. stop posting prostoalex submissions, too.
Who needs editors anyways (Score:2, Insightful)
2) The blurb was written by some third grader, wasn't it?
IT radio-telescope? What is IT? Radio is an adjective, there's no need to hyphenate radio telescope.
"At this time"? Now? I thought it won't be completed until 2008?
We detect radio waves, not wavelengths.
"the Lofar images might be somewhat blurry"? Images? Since when do we get images from radio telescopes?
They're obviously not sending data at 22 terabits/sec today, since the telescope hasn't even been constructed yet.
"This" is why it needs stella? Oh, the antecedent is yet to come in the sentence.
Re:When Roland meets Slashdot... (Score:3, Insightful)
So what is it about Roland's submissions that people find objectionable? If they're paid placements I can understand, but if they're simply articles which are interesting enough to get posted then where's the harm?
Re:When Roland meets Slashdot... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Age of Universe (Score:1, Insightful)
Next to that you arn't using the statistics correctly. The real question should be, what is the chance intelligent life could come into existence in this universe on a year to year basis. You'll probably find near 100% chance within a few 10s of billions of years I suspect.
Hope that helps clear some confusion up.
Supercomputer (Score:5, Insightful)
Even though this telescope will not be placed in the most densily populated area, the Netherlands is hardly the place to go looking for 350 KM^2 of land to put a radio telescope on. It's nice for business and science here, but putting it on a field somewhere in East Germany, Tsech Republic etc. might be more economic.
Anyway, I'm buying stock in the storage business.
Re:usual quote from Scotty re physics, immutabilit (Score:2, Insightful)
You'd really like to have a directional antenna to block out signals that are not coming from the sky.
That's why it's a 'phased array'. The concept is pretty simple: if a signal is coming from a certain direction, it will arrive at antenna A a fraction of a second earlier than at antenna B. LOFAR measures the incoming signals and their phase at all the antennae, and then lets software 'untangle' this information to reconstruct the direction of the different signals.
There's an awful lot of man-made noise and very strong signals in this frequency range.
This is true, but most of it is limited to certain frequency intervals. There are still enough other frequencies left to observe in.
One lousy piece of rusty fence wire can intermix all that crud and rebroadcast all kinds of sum and difference gobs of spurious signals.
Actually I think the wavelengths used here are large enough to just ignore rusty fence wire ;)
Fact is that this 'idea' is up and running, and it works!