Planned telescope array sparks supercomputing efforts

Arstechnica : The Square Kilometer Array, which has been proposed for either South Africa or Australia and New Zealand, will be a massive project comprising thousands of radio telescopes linked together. Because of its size, it is expected to produce more than one exabyte (1 billion gigabytes) of data every dayâmdash;approximately twice the global daily traffic of the internet. To meet the necessary computing power and energy needs of the new telescope array, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy and IBM announced today an initial €32.9 million ($43.6 million), five-year collaboration to research extremely fast but low-power exascale computer systems. Once completed, the telescope array will be used to explore evolving galaxies, dark matter, and the origins of the universe. But the advances in computing technology that the project has sparked will benefit more than just the field of astronomy.