When Lofar Meets Stella

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."

Stella

[rapidweather]

They still have "Stella" shouting contests [neworleans.com] to honor the scene in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951),featuring Marlon Brando's plea to Kim Hunter as Stella Kowalski. Wonder if that has something to do with the choice of names for the computer.

Re:Who needs editors anyways

[Anonymous Coward]

kiltedtaco writes: "the Lofar images might be somewhat blurry"? Images? Since when do we get images from radio telescopes?

Ummm... Actually radio telescopes have been producing high quality images for years. In terms of sharpness (angular resolution) these images can be even better than the hubble. There are plenty of examples at www.nrao.edu.

For example:
http://www.nrao.edu/imagegallery/php/level3.php?id =5 [nrao.edu]

Re:From Piqy's stupid Blogvertisement

[John Hasler]

WTF is this "radio picture" he keeps talking about?

Perhaps he's talking about some of these? [nrao.edu]

-1 gross incompetence

I don't think you quite deserve that.

What they don't talk about....

[RayBender]

..is radio-frequency interference. They are building a radio telescope that is extremely sensitive in the FM and TV bands, and putting it right smack in the middle of one of the most densely populated and radio-loud areas in the world.

It might sound impressive, but it's a stupid idea. The main reason they need a supercomputer in the first place is so they can try and remove the effect of the interference - but "taking it all out in software" is exceedingly difficult. Especially if the RFI gets so bad that it saturates the receiver front-ends.

LOFAR (my office mate worked on it) used to be an international collaboration, but it broke a apart because the Dutch insisted it be build in their country, rather than in some place more sensible, like Western Australia.