IBM gets SKA tender

IBM and the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, Astron, have been granted a EUR32.9 million tender to research extremely fast, but low-power exascale computer systems targeted for the international Square Kilometre Array (SKA).

SA and Australia are bidding to host the mega telescope that will be the world's largest and most sensitive.

The initial EUR32.9 million, five-year collaboration will materialise in Drenthe, the Netherlands, at the newly-established Astron & IBM Centre for Exascale Technology. The computer system will be targeted to read, analyse and store one exabyte of raw data per day, two times the entire daily traffic on the World Wide Web.

Scientists estimate the processing power required to operate the telescope will be equal to several millions of today's fastest computers.

Astron is one of the scientific partners in the international consortium that is developing the SKA. Upon completion in 2024, the telescope will be used to explore evolving galaxies, dark matter and even the very origins of the universe, dating back more than 13 billion years, says the institute.

“The next generation of large scientific instruments, of which the SKA is a key example, requires a high-performance computing architecture and data transfer links with a capacity that far exceeds current state-of-the-art technology.”

To help solve this unprecedented challenge, IBM and Astron formed the collaboration called DOME. It will investigate emerging technologies for large-scale and efficient exascale computing, data transport and storage processes, and streaming analytics that will be required to read, store and analyse all the raw data that will be collected daily.

“If you take the current global daily Internet traffic and multiply it by two, you are in the range of the data set that the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope will be collecting every day. This is Big Data Analytics to the extreme. With DOME we will embark on one of the most data-intensive science projects ever planned, which will eventually have much broader applications beyond radio astronomy research,” says head of IBM Research in Zurich, Ton Engbersen.

Scientists at Astron and IBM will investigate advanced accelerators and 3D stacked chips for more energy-efficient computing. The only acceptable way to build and operate the extremely powerful computer systems required for the SKA is to dramatically reduce their power consumption, says Marco de Vos, MD of Astron. “DOME gives us unique opportunities to try out new approaches in green supercomputing.”

A global community of astronomers from more than 20 countries is setting out to build the SKA, which will have millions of antennas to collect radio signals, covering a collection area equivalent to one square kilometre, but spanning a huge surface area - more than 3 000km wide, or approximately the width of the continental US.