SKA Africa selects Mellanox 10/40 Gigabit Ethernet switches, cables to build world's largest radio telescope

Mellanox Technologies (NASDAQ:MLNX), a leading supplier of high-performance, end-to-end interconnect solutions, through its local South African partner, Eclipse Holdings, a specialist high-performance computing systems integrator, announced today its SwitchX-2-based SX1012 and SX1710 10/40 Gigabit Ethernet switches and LinkX optical cables have been chosen to build a high-capacity L3 multi-cast network to accelerate the South African MeerKAT radio telescope, a precursor to the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescope, which will be integrated into the mid-frequency component of SKA Phase 1.

The SKA Project is an international enterprise to build the largest and most sensitive radio telescope in the world. Deploying thousands of radio telescopes, in three unique configurations, it will enable astronomers to monitor the sky in unprecedented detail and survey the entire sky thousands of times faster than any system currently in existence.

"The amount of data that will be generated by the MeerKAT antennas is equivalent to more than 5 million DVDs every day or about 64 DVDs per second," said Francois Kapp, sub-system manager at SKA Africa. "This enormous amount of data requires high-bandwidth, low-jitter networks. After a comprehensive review of the various products in the market, we concluded that Mellanox's SwitchX-2 Ethernet switches and optical cables will provide us with the best value enterprise-class Ethernet infrastructure that meets all the requirements for our systems."

"The work to be performed by the SKA is fundamental to mankind's understanding of the universe and our role in it," said Gilad Shainer, vice-president of marketing at Mellanox Technologies. "We are proud to have our 10/40 Gigabit Ethernet switches and optical cables selected by SKA Africa for this large data centre infrastructure, and to be able to help with this important research mission."

"The SKA project will push all ICT boundaries as we know them today," said Nico Meintjes, CEO at Eclipse Holdings. "To have been selected to participate in this groundbreaking project is momentous and exciting, and demonstrates that South Africa has both the know-how and skills to assist in the design, build and roll-out of these next-generation technologies."

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