Professor Philip Diamond is the director general of SKA Organisation, which is leading the SKA Project to create the world’s largest radio-telescope. For the less astronomically-minded, SKA stands for square kilometre array and an array is a cluster of connected antennas.
At Huawei Connect in Shanghai, he told the audience the amount of data-intensive processing power the project will need and how super computers and artificial intelligence will help to process the vast quantities of data that will be generated.
He said that building large radio telescopes that aim to gather as much information as possible will mean dealing with a lot of data. “The SKA antennas themselves will send a huge volume of data to the massive digital systems and supercomputers, one in each of the two host countries, where the data will be processed to allow astronomers to undertake scientific investigations,” he said.
Diamond explained that this will be a data-intensive process that will require initially around 50 petaflops of dedicated digital signal processing power that will grow to 250 petaflops as the capability increases.
A flop is a floating point operation per second and is used in fields of scientific computation that require a high level of accuracy. In total, Diamond expects SKA to archive 600 petabytes of data per year.
He said there are two key areas of the project; the study of pulsars using radio signals to understand gravity and the study of hydrogen to “uncover the secrets of the cosmic dawn and the birth of stars and galaxies.”
To achieve the necessary level of accuracy and sensitivity and to cover the frequencies, SKA will use many connected antennas, known as arrays which can act together.
The SKA project will have two arrays using different technologies; one in South Africa with 200 large dishes and the other in Australia with 130,000 smaller antennas. “These remote locations allow us to get away from artificially generated interference which would pollute the extremely faint radiations that we wish to detect,” said Diamond.
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