South African, African and international broadband connectivity to the continent will need to grow exponentially in order to meet the challenge posed by the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project.
So said Bruce Wallace, SKA project officer, speaking during the ITWeb Broadband Conference held at The Forum in Bryanston last week.
Wallace revealed that the data traffic to be generated by the SKA will greatly exceed present worldwide Internet traffic, saying exaflop (one quintillion floating point operations per second) computers will be required to process the data.
“This is a huge project which will probably include an array of approximately 3 000 antennae spread over 3 000km in nine African countries. The cost of power and data transport requirements increase exponentially with distance, so the outlying stations will not be connected initially in real-time, since we are talking about transportable data storage to the tune of many petrabytes,” said Wallace.
He added that the MeerKAT precursor, which will be fully commissioned in December to demonstrate SA's readiness to host the SKA, needs at least 10Gbps of international bandwidth to transport processed data from the onsite correlator high-performance computing centre to the European National Research Network.
Describing the overall SKA data transport requirements, Wallace said the centre will deploy three antenna technologies measuring frequencies from 70MHz to 25.5GHz.
Combining all the figures, he also revealed that the data bandwidth requirements from the antenna systems to the core is 15.2Pbps while the international data bandwidth requirements from the core to the European National Research Networks is estimated to be 100Gbps.
SA and Australia have been shortlisted to host the SKA, which will be the largest radio telescope in the world.
According to Wallace, the SKA will be about 50 to 100 times more sensitive than the most powerful telescopes today, adding that it will collect very faint radio waves from the early universe.
“It will help the science community to answer fundamental questions in astronomy, physics and cosmology, including the nature of dark energy and dark matter, in other words, celestial bodies such as stars and the planets,” said Wallace.
He added that the SKA will be a powerful time machine that scientists will use to back in time to explore the origins of the first galaxies.
“If there is life elsewhere in the universe, the SKA will help us find it,” he said.
The total value for the SA SKA programme is estimated to be R2.1 billion, and the decision on the host will be made in 2012. The first phase completion is earmarked for 2016, while the second phase is expected to be finished around 2023or 2024.
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