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Space Science

Software Telescope 62

Posted by timothy from the small-pieces-hooked-together dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The BBC News is running the story 'Pyramid power' probes universe which is about LOFAR's software telescope for radio astronomy. The heart of the system is a IBM Blue Gene which processes data from an array of simple pyramidal radio antennae. The array of antennae are also multitasking in the fields of geophysics and agriculture."
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Software Telescope More

Software Telescope

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  • Why can't we distribute this work? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jarich ( 733129 ) on Sunday July 10, 2005 @08:43PM (#13029750) Homepage Journal
    Why do projects like this have to be done on supercomputers? Wouldn't it be a cool to be involved with this, in a distributed.net style.

    If you participate, you get free access to all the high res graphics!

    • Re:Why can't we distribute this work? (Score:5, Funny)

      by AndroidCat ( 229562 ) on Sunday July 10, 2005 @08:54PM (#13029791) Homepage
      If you participate, you get free access to all the high res graphics!

      And if you help out with the potato farm project, can you get an order of fries with that?

    • Re:Why can't we distribute this work? (Score:5, Informative)

      by karvind ( 833059 ) <karvind@NoSPAM.gmail.com> on Sunday July 10, 2005 @09:14PM (#13029872) Journal
      From LOFAR [lofar.org] website:

      The bandwidth of the connection between each Remote Stations and the Central Processing Systems will be ~10 Gbit/s, of which ~ 2.5 Gbit/s will be occupied by the sustained datarate resulting from the sensors.

      LOFAR produces very large data streams, especially for the astronomy application (e.g. 6 TB of raw visibility data for an 8 beam, 4 hour synthesis observation, after integration for 1 sec and over 10kHz).

      They mention that final post-processing can be done at a central processing station (I am guessing the Blue Gene one) or locally by the users. Only bottlenecks seems to be the bandwidth.

      LOFAR post-processing can take place either at the Central Processor or locally with the users (in particular at Science Centers). If the available Internet capacity is sufficient, intermediate dataproducts can be transported to the user, and local processing can be done. Otherwise processing resources at the Central Processor are available for further data reduction (within the limits of the Central Processor processing budget).

    • Why do projects like this have to be done on supercomputers?

      Technical points aside, one political reason for not going to distributed processing is this: some want their data bits to be strictly proprietary.

      By distributing, there will be a chance that the distributed data bits would be compromised and captured by someone else (e.g., leading to scooping the cheif investigator). It's a long shot, I know, but that is something that the organization like this need to take into account.
    • My computer can hardly handle running SETI, and I don't think it would be that much cooler to be involved in this.

    • Re:Why can't we distribute this work? (Score:5, Informative)

      by IWannaBeAnAC ( 653701 ) on Sunday July 10, 2005 @10:31PM (#13030173)
      For this project, it is the huge rate of incoming data that is the problem. They must process it immedately, as it would take a huge amount of storage to keep even a few hours worth of data. Anyway, the processing will involve determining the correlations between data from different sensors, which probably requires lots of communication. Both these points are big negatives for a distributed.net computation.

      Of course, you would know this if you had RTFA before you posted...

  • Pyramid Power? (Score:3, Funny)

    by TripMaster Monkey ( 862126 ) * on Sunday July 10, 2005 @08:44PM (#13029752)

    I hope the people over at LOFAR have considered all the ramifications of Pyramid Power [algonet.se]... ^_^
    • In todays political climate, they probably didnt consider the ramifications of calling it "Pyramid" Anything...
    • The Mythbusters did an investigation of Pyramid power the other day. It was pretty entertaining. They actually found, in one case, that an apple half placed under the pyramid survived much better than its counterpart a foot away. Turns out it was cause they cut the apple with their woodshop's circular saw (in other words, majorly un-sterilized...)

  • The real question is.... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 10, 2005 @08:58PM (#13029807)
    The real question is who designed these "pyramids"? It's obvious that our current society is not advanced enough for such a feat, so that leaves us three possibilities.

    A) A past civilization capable of such feats.
    B) A future version of our civilization with time travel.
    C) Otherworldly visitors with hyperadvanced technology.

    I fear we'll never quite understand this mystery.

    ---
    News for real nerds, stuff that actually matters. [anti-slash.org]

    • Re:The real question is.... (Score:4, Funny)

      by Ingolfke ( 515826 ) on Sunday July 10, 2005 @09:45PM (#13029987) Journal
      Maybe no one designed them at all you idiot. Just because something exists and seems to have some purpose or logical structure doesn't mean it was created. I doubt they were created at all, they probably just came into existence or are the result of metal deposits that have, over time, formed into shapes that appear to be, and are suitable for us as, antennae.
    • The pyramids ("which pyramids" you ask? The pyramids, you insensitive clod!) were obviously made by the same people who created the face on mars [cobbs.ca].

      The whole "probing the universe" line is a ruse. "Probing" my as . . . err . . . foot. The antennas are there in order to harness the universal power of the pyramids. Anyone with half a brain could see that! *

      So there. :-P

      _____

      * People with whole brains, on the other hand, frequently have trouble seeing things of that sort.

  • LOFAR is going to be exciting (Score:5, Informative)

    by karvind ( 833059 ) <karvind@NoSPAM.gmail.com> on Sunday July 10, 2005 @08:58PM (#13029811) Journal
    Our earlier Slashdat stories on LOFAR: a consortium between ASTRON (The Netherlands), NRL (USA) and MIT/Haystack (USA).:

    When Lofar Meets Stella [slashdot.org]

    350 KM Diameter Radio Telescope Array [slashdot.org]

    I was talking to a professor [cornell.edu] in astronomy here and he mentioned about some of the conflicts between US and Europe regarding the plan. That is one of the reasons why US is also working on Square Kilometer Array [skatelescope.org]. LOFAR imaging telescope are designed for the 10-240 MHz frequency range where as SKA will cover 0.15-20GHz or higher. Hopefully the two efforts will complement each other.

    • Re:LOFAR is going to be exciting (Score:5, Informative)

      by steve_vmwx ( 824627 ) on Sunday July 10, 2005 @11:43PM (#13030473) Homepage Journal
      Hmmm. Wasn't Euro v's USA. It was the Dutch v's everyone else.

      LOFAR was supposed to be the international forerunner to SKA for a lot of the tech.

      Western Australia won the site selection. Dutch government said "if you build it here we'll throw in a bucket load of cash". Dutch reps took the bird in the hand (kind of understandable given the global spending habits of governments on peaceful science).

      Everyone else in the original LOFAR weren't (and still aren't) too happy.

      Still... it's a nice piece of kit.

      SKA development continues. WA is again up for site selection. Speaking as an Oz astronomer I'm hopefull. It's a great site for radio astronomy.

      For the person who asked, the antenna design is a folded dipole. Google it :)

      Cheers
      Stevo

  • Where's Da Plans...? (Score:5, Funny)

    by __aaclcg7560 ( 824291 ) on Sunday July 10, 2005 @09:01PM (#13029820)
    So where is the link to build my own radio telescope and supercomputer? Or do I have to wait until the next issue of Make [makezine.com] comes out?

  • Might not be as useful as first thought... (Score:3, Funny)

    by xquark ( 649804 ) on Sunday July 10, 2005 @09:02PM (#13029824) Homepage
    "It is also possible that weather monitoring will become so localised
    and instantaneous that weather forecasting will become "now-casting".

    I'm sorry but I don't need some remote sensor device using wi-fi telling
    me that it is raining hail stones, the pain from the fractures to my
    cranium will be more than enough.

    Arash Partow
    __________________________________________ ________ ______
    Be one who knows what they don't know,
    Instead of being one who knows not what they don't know,
    Thinking they know everything about all things.
    http://www.partow.net/ [partow.net]

  • Amazing infrastructure (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Sv-Manowar ( 772313 ) on Sunday July 10, 2005 @09:03PM (#13029828) Homepage Journal
    The article states that individual pyramidal radio antennae are all connected back over fiber to the main Blue Gene supercomputer (Stella). As the antennae are spread over 350km, I think this represents a pretty serious amount of infrastructure development. Making the data collected available for local commercial use seems to have been of real use to the local community, and I wonder if there are a lot more situations where remote sensor networks could be of aid.
  • time to upgrade the video card again! damn horse nebula in all it's beauty and colours...

  • Rise of software-embodied functionality (Score:5, Interesting)

    by G4from128k ( 686170 ) on Sunday July 10, 2005 @09:39PM (#13029964)
    This development highlights the ongoing replacement of specialized, engineered devices with general purpose CPU + software. So many things (car's carburetors, motor speed controls, printers, appliance controls, radios, etc.) were formerly designed using mechanical and electrical circuits that implemented the needed functionality. Now they do it with a CPU such as an embedded controller and a bit of code in flash-RAM.

    The shift from hardware-embodied functionality to software-embodied functionality is very profound because of the differences in cost structures. The cost of complexity for software is far lower than the corresponding cost of complexity for hardware. The cost of manufacturing for software is lower than the cost of manufacturing for hardware. The cost of modifying or upgrading software is far lower than the cost of replacing or upgrading hardware. Products with software-embodied functionality can be designed at low cost, made in volume at lost cost and changed at will after sale. The result is greater variety and faster development of new products.

    The effects go much farther than cost and variety. Perhaps the most interesting effect is that caused by Moore's law. Whereas mechanical and electronic system have not improved much in the last few decades, CPUs have. Creating software-embodied systems means that the device's performance can become slaved to Moore's law -- a software-embodied product gets a free performance boost with every doubling of transistor count/clockspeed.

    I apologize for using this /. cliche, but I, for one, welcome our new software-embodied overlords.

    • Re:Rise of software-embodied functionality (Score:5, Insightful)

      by pe1chl ( 90186 ) on Monday July 11, 2005 @03:14AM (#13031177)
      Unfortunately it has also increased (in my perception at least) the number of products that go to market before being well developed and tested.

      In the old style development, you had to make sure you had it right before starting production, or else it would cost you a lot of money for retooling and fixing already produced items. Today, you develop a working microcontroller solution (hopefully without hardware bugs), quickly hack together some firmware, and start production and sale.

      The consumer will come back with numerous complaints and then is the time to look at the software and maybe release some updates.

      Some manufacturers even don't fix software for existing products but just do that in the next model. Early adopters pay the price for a crippled product.

  • Rarely do I see "potato watch" in a "pyramid power" story.

    Lovin it.

  • Why isn't there any tech info on the antenna? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Why are they "pyramid" shaped?

    Is it a simple dipole? Is one leg just for support? How far down does the wires inside the pipes go (if that's how it works)?
    Do they have a box right there at the antenna or do cables run over to a small building where all the other processing stuff is?

    If you had a big enough back yard and a 3 Ghz system (with Linux of course) what could you get? (1 acre, 5 acres?)

  • Software Telescope (Score:3, Informative)

    by PigIronBob ( 885337 ) on Sunday July 10, 2005 @09:48PM (#13030004)
    To bad that the author didn't use a dutch spell checker; Gonungen should be Groningen, a university that has an produced impressive array of Astronomers such as Maarten Schmidt (identified the first Quasar), Bart Bok (established Siding Springs in Australia), Jan Oort (Proposed the 'Oort Cloud' of comets),All of these were tought by Jacobus Cornelius Capteyn, whole calculated the mass of the Milky Way Galaxy.
  • When I saw the headline "Software Telescope", I thought maybe someone had invented a device which would let us see Longhorn going GA.
  • I believe the most powerful supercomputer in Europe is in Spain rather than the Netherlands as mentioned on th BBC website.

  • People wanting to participate (Score:4, Informative)

    by Quiberon ( 633716 ) on Monday July 11, 2005 @12:08AM (#13030546) Journal
    Of course you can participate. The Dutch Education Ministry has just run a competition; prize of 3 laptop computers for the school with the most creative idea of how to use radiotelescope and attached supercomputer in a school classroom.

    And for the winner, IBM drops in a team to make it happen.

    So, what do you want to do, and how do you propose to do it ?

  • Interesting Approach (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mbrother ( 739193 ) * <mbrother.uwyo@edu> on Monday July 11, 2005 @01:44AM (#13030838) Homepage
    One of my friends/acquaintances, Heino Falcke, works for LOFAR. I was with him at a meeting in Italy in May and got the inside scoop on a lot of things...but it was so far out I'm afraid I didn't assimilate a whole lot of the details. I've used the VLA and published a few radio-based papers, but I'm far from an expert. Definiately a revolutionary, technology-pushing system sure to produce some great science.

  • Some info (Score:4, Interesting)

    by odourpreventer ( 898853 ) on Monday July 11, 2005 @07:48AM (#13031963)

    I did my Master Thesis work [lois-space.net] at IRFU (Institute for Space Physics in Uppsala) [www.irfu.se] with LOIS (LOFAR Outrigger in Scandinavia) [lois-space.net] and may be able to shed some light.

    The antennas (or aerials) need not necessarily be pyramid shaped [lois-space.net]. A multitude of shapes exist. The two antenna elements are mounted orthogonally and allow two vector components of the signal to be retrieved. The LOIS antennas go a step further and have three elements, also mounted orthogonally. This means that not only can it decode AM and FM signals, but also phase and polarisation modulated signals. The last one is specially interesting, since polarisation modulation isn't bandwidth limited.

    What's even more cool with the system is that it's entirely digital; the signals are demodulated using folding distortion. This means that there isn't any (theoretical) lower limit to the carrier wave frequency, which opens up new possibilities for studying background radiation.

    The 10 Gb lines are not just for show. The output from each antenna system can easily use up all that bandwidth, and presently does so. And since the resolution of a cluster depends on the number of antennas, it's all about computing power.

  • Interesting...Robert Charles Wilson wrote "Blind Lake" which was essentially about a software telescope powered by quantum computers. It was a fairly interesting read. Once again, reality imitates fiction. ;)

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