The African bid proposal led by South Africa was awarded 70 percent of the hosting of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) on May 25, 2012, with 30 percent set to be handled by Australia and New Zealand.
Eight African countries, including Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia and Zambia, led by South Africa, have been working on the proposal to host the SKA in Africa since 2003.
Although the African bid was acknowledged and viewed as the best proposal, based on the proposed array of receiving dishes and the supply and cost of electricity, the decision was taken to split the hosting based on socio-economic, political and financial factors.
On completion of construction, the SKA will be the world’s largest radio telescope at about 50 to 100 times more sensitive than any other radio telescope that exists on Earth.
It will be used to probe the universe for answers on astronomy, physics and cosmology, as well as the nature of dark energy and dark matter.
The telescope will require a supercomputer that will be able to perform approximately 1000 operations per second, which is equivalent to the processing power of 100 million PCs.
The SKA is expected to produce Exabytes of data daily for a single beam, per one square kilometre. This translates to between 300 and 1500 Petabytes of data to be stored per year, once processed.
IBM along with their partner ASTRON have launched an initial five-year collaboration called DOME.
This is an unprecedented challenge, according to Ton Engbersen of IBM Research.
Engbersen goes on to explain “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, he says.
With DOME, Engbersen said: “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.”
Given the size of the expected exascale computer, it is expected that it will be electricity hungry and this is where further innovation on this project could benefit the society, ASTRON’s managing director Marco de Vos says.
“Large research infrastructures like the SKA require extremely powerful computer systems to process all the data. The only acceptable way to build and operate these systems is to dramatically reduce their power consumption,” he said.
Marco de Vos said: “The DOME gives us unique opportunities to try out new approaches in Green Supercomputing. This will be beneficial for society at large as well.”
Having the SKA hosted and constructed in Africa, along with the unprecedented development of the supercomputer by IBM, depicts the continent’s potentials in science and technology.
