IBM Designing Superman Servers For World's Largest Telescope

Nerval's Lobster writes "How's this for a daunting task? By 2017, IBM must develop low-power microservers that can handle 10 times the traffic of today's Internet — and resist blowing desert sands, to boot. Sound impossible? Hopefully not. Those are the design parameters of the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) Project, the world's largest radio telescope, located in South Africa and Australia amid some of the world's most rugged terrain. It will be up to the SKA-specific business unit of South Africa's National Research Foundation, IBM, and ASTON (also known as the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy) to jointly design the servers. Scientists from all three organizations will collaborate remotely and at the newly established ASTRON & IBM Center for Exascale Technology in Drenthe, the Netherlands. By peering into the furthest regions of space, the SKA project hopes to glimpse 'back in time,' where the radio waves from some of the earliest moments of the universe — before stars were formed — are still detectable. The hardware is powerful enough to pick up an airport radar on a planet 50 light-years away, according to the SKA team."

Re:10x today's internet traffic

[c0lo]

can handle 10 times the traffic of today's Internet

Yeah, you can get something on the front page of slashdot if you use stupid, misleading metrics like this. Soulskill has his head buried in the sand.

A single computer, probably not.
Otherwise, the entire SKA will indeed produce 10 times the amount of data trafficking the today's internet [skatelescope.org].

Re:10x today's internet traffic

[Trepidity]

True, but that's getting pretty common in large-scale scientific applications these days. The LHC generates about 100 terabytes per second, for example. The numbers on the page you linked say SKA will generate "enough raw data to fill 15 million 64 GB iPods every day", which is actually an order of magnitude lower: 15 million * 64 GB = 960 PB per day. Divide that by 86400 seconds in a day, and you get about 11 TB/s.

Re:10x today's internet traffic

[c0lo]

True, but that's getting pretty common in large-scale scientific applications these days. The LHC generates about 100 terabytes per second, for example. The numbers on the page you linked say SKA will generate "enough raw data to fill 15 million 64 GB iPods every day", which is actually an order of magnitude lower: 15 million * 64 GB = 960 PB per day. Divide that by 86400 seconds in a day, and you get about 11 TB/s.

While LHC generates 10 times more data in a single experiment (usually scheduled months or years ahead), think that SKA will generate data each day every day.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

The LHC only records about 25 PB a year though, as the raw data is heavily filtered by custom hardware before getting to the more off the shelf computers that record data for later use. SKA on the other hand, needs to hold on to raw data for a couple hours until a run is complete, requiring intermediate storage of data of about a PB an hour, which will then get reduced to about a 1-5 PB a day for longer term storage and analysis. The intermediate data will use conventional hardware for processing, but eve

Re:

[Trepidity]

Interesting numbers; thanks for the clarification! I agree that's a significantly more ambitious goal by some of those metrics. A PB/hour is indeed quite a lot of intermediate storage, and even the reduced 1-5 PB/day is more than any existing experiment.

I realize it's a lot to ask for popular science journalism, but that's one reason I'd like more specifics and precision in some of these stories. What do we mean by data being generated: where is it generated, how long is it stored for, what are its characte

Re:

[ldobehardcore]

it is about making things relatable to those that have little understanding of the topic.

What's ironic is that 15 million iPods is no more relatable than saying 960 Petabytes. What do you imagine a pile of 15million iPods looks like? Or is it 15million retail boxes stacked in neat rectangular prisms? Or is it 15 million iPods laid end to end? Big numbers need to be expressed in ways that are easily divisible into realistic chunks people can hold in their heads. I have no idea what kind of volume this m

Re:

[fyngyrz]

And with a final goal of thousands of antennas collecting up to 30 GHz signals across nearly the full spectrum

Hmmm. Sounds like a marvelous database for us SDR freaks [fyngyrz.com] to troll through, big chunks of spectrum at a time, eyes on the waterfall and spectral displays.

All ya need to do is create a server that will supply a file that is a chunk-o-spectrum as baseband IQ data, and you'll likely have a whole bunch of eyes on it for you. You'd certainly have mine!

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

I think they've used a low estimate for the SKA. SKA phase I consists of three parts: a single-pixel dish array in South Africa, a focal-plane-array dish array in Australia, and an aperture-array tile array in Australia. The second part, with the focal plane arrays, is about twice the size of the precursor instrument ASKAP. The data rate for ASKAP is:

(36 antennas) * (192 elements per antenna) * (384 MHz bandwidth) * (factor of 2 to get the Nyquist rate) * (1 byte/sample) = 5.3 TB/s

So data rate for one of

How many?

[dutchwhizzman]

How many olympic sized swimming pools can be filled with the servers?

26 petabytes?

[bloodhawk]

Is internet traffic really only 26 Petabytes a month, while that is a big number it sounds awefully low to me as the place I work does 15 Terabytes a month and they are little more than a miniscule pimple on face of the internet.

Re:

[iYk6]

Agreed. There are roughly 100 million internet enabled households in the United States. If each of these sent and received, on average, 1GB per month, that's 100 PB.

Re:

[bloodhawk]

I would seriously doubt where I work even ranks in the top 10,000 internet content providers by volume, yet the article would suggest they would have to be one of the top providers for there numbers to be true.

Re:

[c0lo]

that is a big number it sounds awefully low to me

Well, it is actually low. E.g. the entire cloud fits a single server on a cable modem (true, with lots of caching). You ask for citations? Here you go [xkcd.com]

Re:

[scheme]

Is internet traffic really only 26 Petabytes a month, while that is a big number it sounds awefully low to me as the place I work does 15 Terabytes a month and they are little more than a miniscule pimple on face of the internet.

That's just wrong. Open Science Grid transfers about 1.4PB [iu.edu] a day and I seriously doubt OSG uses a significant fraction of the bandwidth on the net.

Planets 50 Light years away have airports?

[Paleolibertarian]

Wow! How is this possible given that the intensity of radio waves diminish at a factor equal to the square of the distance? That's some powerful radar or a darned big capture area of the antenna here on earth. How is it distinguishable from CBR.

Re:

[stanlyb]

Where? On the earth, in the empty space?

Re:

[Paleolibertarian]

A lot of great math there but it completely misses the point. A point source radiator, at that distance couldn't be distinguished from the radiation coming from the planets star. I don't care how much processing power you put on the various correlated antenna. The capture area BTW is not the longest baseline between array collectors. That would be the resolving power meaning the beam-width of the antenna array at 50 light years which would be far greater than the distance between the planet and its star. Ca

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

You *do* know we can detect signals well below the noise floor, yes?

Re:

[flyingfsck]

...and the SKA low noise receivers are super cooled.

Re:

[Paleolibertarian]

The sensitivity and thermal noise of a receiver has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that a mythical airport radar on a planet orbiting a star at 50 light years distance, that cannot be resolved as a separate source by any known optical or synthetic aperture will be completely overwhelmed by the output of the planet's star. A wildly inaccurate (because I'm to lazy to do the math) analogy would be comparing the output of a microwave oven with the output of 1 billion blast furnaces. While the EM spectru

Re:

[tibit]

This should be +5 informative. Well done.

Don't worry

[Anonymous Coward]

they'll just do what they did with NCSA and decide they can't make money doing it and walk away.

Re:

[PlastikMissle]

From the Wikipedia entry [wikipedia.org]:

"Suitable sites for the SKA telescope need to be in unpopulated areas with guaranteed very low levels of man-made radio interference. Four sites were initially proposed in South Africa, Australia, Argentina and China.[16] After considerable site evaluation surveys, Argentina and China were dropped and the other two sites were shortlisted (with New Zealand joining the Australian bid, and 8 other African countries joining the South African bid):"

Re:

[lexsird]

Why not build a monster one in space instead? Think space elevator please.

Re:

[Paleolibertarian]

Government masters who by their nature violate ZAP are equally evil no matter the color of their skin.

worldwide blackout imminent?

[rjejr]

Is this the machine that lets us see our lives 9 months in the future?

sensitive

[planckscale]

The impressive part of the blurb to me was the ability to detect something like an airport radar on a planet 50 light-years away. With that sensitivity I would think this could go a long way towards SETI, nevermind background radiation.

Re:sensitive

[femtobyte]

One big obstacle is, as with SETI, not merely gathering super-sensitive data, but processing all the data to identify E.T.'s air traffic control in trillions of other (natural) radio sources. Just because you're sensitive enough to tell whether a signal is present or absent *when you know exactly what to look for* doesn't mean you'll be able to identify previously unknown signals.

LOFAR - interferometric array

[Frans Faase]

ASTRON is the organisation that is also running LOFAR [wikipedia.org], which is basically a smaller version of SKA in a different frequency range. It is an interferometric array which requires a central system to process all the signals into one result. LOFAR is using a lot of dedicated hardware and a IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer for this purpose. Because all the signals are digitized at the receivers, this result is a very large stream of data, which are processed (but not stored) by a pipe-line of processors, each combining more and more signals, into one final image.

Re:

[broekema]

The Blue Gene/L was replaced by a Blue Gene/P in 2008. It is interesting to see that, at the beginning of the project, the most powerful supercomputer in Europe (for abour a month or so) was required. Now, only a few years later, more work can be done using only a few servers with accelerators. The SKA will ofcourse be a whole different challenge, which requires a completely different way of thinking about computing.

Bah.

[Black Parrot]

I'll pick a Batman server over a Superman server every time.

Re:

[ButchDeLoria]

A Goku server would totally kick a Superman server's ass!

Re:Bah.

[captjc]

Yeah, but you couldn't install Linux on it because as we all know Batman hates the Penguin!

“Resist blowing desert sands”

[LMariachi]

So they’ll be putting the servers indoors then?

Superman?

[wonkey_monkey]

Since when did "Superman" become a good adjective for describing powerful computer systems? I mean, if you must appeal to the hardcore comic book reading geek, wouldn't Brainiac be a better choice?

Here is an geek info on SKA.

[hamster_nz]

This link [av.it.pt] is a really interesting info on some of the SKA signal processing.

The SAK's power budget is 58MW for signal processing - this is such a high running cost that by spending 30 Million Euro on developing a few custom ASICs to halve that power usage will pay off in 9 months!

Re:

[tibit]

Very informative. While it's a cool project, in a way I'm fine only dealing with distributed signal processing that can power a dozen nodes through one PoE ethernet drop :)

Apollo hardware on moon

[nelsonteixeira777]

Maybe then we'll be able to see Apollo mission hardware on the moon :|