Big Blue Designing Chip to Decode the Big Bang

Jerry Beth writes "IBM is working with European astronomy organization Astron to design a chip that will be used to help gather billions-of-years-old radio signals from deep space in the hopes of learning more about the origins of the universe. From the article: 'It's part of Astron's Square Kilometer Array (SKA) radio telescope project. The SKA will be linked to millions of antennas collecting radio signals from space. The antennas will be spread over a large surface area of the globe but, in the aggregate, they will form a square kilometer's worth of collection area. [...] The microprocessors will essentially help the antennas capture the signals, filter out extraneous data and then convert the signals into data. Astrophysicists will then analyze the data to look for patterns. The weakest signals are the prize in this project, because they will be the oldest.'"

Re:Look and calculate all you want

[rainman_bc]

IT ALL TRACES BACK TO GOD!

Okay, maybe I just don't get it... I'm not religious, but I don't buy into the big bang theory either... Why can't we just theorize that time is not finite - there's no beginning and no end...

Seriously, someone explain to me why time MUST have a beginning? Can't we just accept some things as being infinite?

Impressive tech

[frostilicus2]

I think this is great. The chips will contribute a huge amount of processing power which would be unavailable from current super computers, which will allow calculations with much greater resolution so we should learn a lot.

It would be interesting to actually know the performance of the chips. From the article,

The chips will be made on IBM's silicon germanium process and have a typical peak frequency, or speed, of around 200GHz. They will be made on the 130-nanometre process.

Bearing in mind that these are ASICs and they run at 200GHz each this should allow for an incredibly detailed model to be formed. Can anyone hazard a guess to how the performance would compare to "standard" efficient code running on a microprocessor?

I hope that this leads to some great science.

Re:Look and calculate all you want

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently you're not a mathematician, either.

Can't have an infinite inside of an infinite? Ever heard of the Real number line?

How many numbers do you suppose fit between 0 and 1? (Hint: there are enough that they cannot be enumerated using integers, even though there are an infinite number of integers.)

Now, how many numbers do you suppose fit between 0.5 and 0.6? (Hint: the same answer is correct.)

Re:pissed off

[DaveN59]

Umm, I consider myself to be a creationist, and I'm not pissed off. It seems obvious (to me, anyway) that the Big Bang theory and the creation story are just 2 different views of the same event. The universe was created from a singularity -- where once there was nothing now there is something. Sounds like creation to me. The more we learn about the universe we live in, the more in awe I become of God, the Creator of it all. Anyway, please hold your flames to a minimum. You won't change my fundamental beliefs about God and creation anymore than my spouting off about the Bible will change your cherished beliefs. If you choose to believe we evolved from whatever, so be it.