SKA members (Australia, Canada, China, Italy, New Zealand, South Africa,
The Netherlands and the United Kingdom) are meeting at this moment in Amsterdam.
On March 19th, the SKA Board agreed to pass on the site recommendation to
the members.
According to a note from the Chair -
Quote:
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Originally Posted by SKA Chair 19 March 2012
The members will meet in Amsterdam on 3 April 2012, but it is not likely
that this meeting will make a final decision on the site; rather it will be the start
of a process of discussion and negotiation between the members
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The SKA Board will then meet April 4th (i.e. later today Australian time).
In other related news, IBM and the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy
(ASTRON) have teamed in a 32.9 million Euro, five year initiative named DOME,
which is exploring computer architectures to handle the 1,000,000,000,000,000,000
bytes a day of data the SKA will produce. That is more than twice the amount
of data that is transferred over the entire Internet everyday and more than 100 times
the data produced by the Large Hadron Collider.
A computer system that can handle this much information has never been
built.
Wired magazine are reporting that the DOME team are looking into aspects such
as three-dimensional chip stacking.
See
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/20...-data-per-day/
As it is with the massive data centers that power sites such as Google, an enormous
part of the computing problem for the SKA will be thermodynamics, that is dealing
with the enormous amount of heat that is produced by such an enormous number
of computers.
So what is in it for IBM? As Wired reports -
Quote:
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Originally Posted by wired.com
Dr. Martin Schmatz of IBM Research in Zurich notes that “big data analysis is not only important for astronomers, but more and more important for many industrial applications, like for example in health care.” As more industries generate enormous data sets, curating and analyzing information gets more complicated. IBM envisions incorporating exascale technology into some of these more profitable sectors in coming years, and the SKA provides a convenient testing ground.
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One thing is for sure. Information has become the currency of the 21st Century.