SKA, world's largest radio telescope, will be headquartered in the UK

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-04/30/ska-telescope-headquarters-jodrell-bank

by wglb • 11 years ago

42 23 11 years ago

wired.co.uk

Current systems for handling data would be unable to cope with the demands of the SKA and it is hoped technology will catch up by the time it is completed.

You’ve got to love optimistic engineering!

lotsofmangos• 11 years ago

It worked for the LHC - http://wlcg-public.web.cern.ch/about

blueskin_2• 11 years ago

Not the first time it's been done.

Of course, it's only worked some of the time it's been done, I guess.

kokey• 11 years ago

The part that needs the most optimism is the provision of the connectivity to the section in South Africa, which is unfortunately a political challenge instead of an engineering challenge.

ISL• 11 years ago

Relying on Moore's law-like as caling is becoming standard practice in big science. Someday it'll stop working, but there's plentry of evidence to suggest that tooling will continue to improve on timescales of a decade.

lennel• 11 years ago

Several of my friends worked on the bid for south africa and the volume of data they they were talking about is astounding. Another friend of mine is working on the forked nix os that they are building to run all this, very very interesting,lots of interesting computing. Lots of phd and post doc CS and EE work being done around this in South Africa.

Interestingly the algo which they use to process the data is very simple, several nested loops (trying to find the paper now one of my friends on the project sent me yielded no results), but this algo obivously has to run on masses of data and massively parallel.

dmpk2k• 11 years ago

A tad misleading. It's "based" in the UK, but all the actual antennas are in South Africa and Australia.

I'm looking forward to the results from this monster. You can't get much bigger than this without soon leaving the planet.

davidw• 11 years ago

That's a pity. From what I read, the Padova, Italy bid was better in several ways, so it came down to politics. Apparently, the UK threatened to pull out of the project entirely if their candidate was not chosen.

http://italy.skatelescope.org/2015/03/13/informazioni-sulla-... (Italian)

I'm a bit biased myself, living in Padova, but it's objectively a pretty good place for something like this, just like it was a good place for Galileo in his day.

deutronium• 11 years ago

Why do you think the Italy bid was better out of interest?

IndianAstronaut• 11 years ago

How much data is going to be generated from this and will it be publicly available?

Would be nice if they made a nice data API like NASA has.

https://data.nasa.gov/developer

aardvark179• 11 years ago

How much data? Well, data rates have the potential to be multiple petabytes per second. The main concern is gathering, transmitting, filtering, processing, and storing this data (or enough of it) quickly enough while staying within budget.

yitchelle• 11 years ago

What would you do with the data?

digitalzombie• 11 years ago

Unsupervised Learning Algorithm would be fun.

privong• 11 years ago

and will it be publicly available?

Yes, though I do not know where/how, yet.

It's worth noting that data from existing radio telescopes are freely available. The National Radio Astronomy Observatory in the US operates an archive for their telescopes[0] as does the Atacama Large Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array[1], the Australia Telescope Compact Array[2], the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope[3], and many others. Note however that much/most of this data is not the final data products but is raw and/or semi-calibrated.

[0] http://archive.nrao.edu/

[1] https://almascience.nrao.edu/alma-data/archive

[2] http://www.narrabri.atnf.csiro.au/observing/archive_requests...

[3] https://www.astron.nl/wsrt-archive/php/

peterstjohn• 11 years ago

This is Madness!

TheHegemon• 11 years ago

All the people downvoting you have Bad Manners :D.

JohnLen• 11 years ago

This is great. Yeah. The power of Technology !!!

blueskin_2• 11 years ago

Mildly misleading title there; the dishes are all in the southern hemisphere IIRC.