by Angela Guess
Peter Pachal of Mashable reports that IBM is working on a telescope that will generate more information than the entire internet does on a daily basis. He writes, “There’s a massive telescope on the drawing board that hasn’t even started construction yet, but when it’s finished in 2024, it’ll generate more data in a single day than the entire Internet. For scientists to ensure they’ll be able to handle all that raw information, they need to start working on new computing technologies now. Fortunately, IBM is on it.”
He continues, “The computing giant is collaborating with ASTRON (the Netherlands Institute of Radio Astronomy) to develop the next-generation computer tech needed to handle the colossal amount of data captured by the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), a new radio telescope that will spread sensing equipment over a span 3,000 kilometers wide, or about the width of the continental U.S.A.”
Pachal goes on, “‘One of the goals is to search what happened at the time of the Big Bang, 13 billion years ago,’ IBM researcher Ronanld Luijten told Mashable. ‘We need to figure out what technology needs to be chosen in order to build this large antenna.’ The project is called DOME, and it’s challenged with finding a way to capture and process approximately one exabyte every day, which works out to about twice the amount of data that’s generated every day by the World Wide Web, IBM says. To do that in a way that doesn’t consume a massive amount of energy, IBM will need to develop some entirely new processing architectures before construction on the telescope begins in 2017.”
