From the post:
Pretoria, South Africa, March 11, 2013: Square Kilometer Array (SKA) South Africa, a business unit of the country’s National Research Foundation is joining ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, and IBM in a four-year collaboration to research extremely fast, but low-power exascale computer systems aimed at developing advanced technologies for handling the massive amount of data that will be produced by the SKA, which is one of the most ambitious science projects ever undertaken.
The SKA is an international effort to build the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope, which is to be located in Southern Africa and Australia to help better understand the history of the universe. The project constitutes the ultimate Big Data challenge, and scientists must produce major advances in computing to deal with it. The impact of those advances will be felt far beyond the SKA project-helping to usher in a new era of computing, which IBM calls the era of cognitive systems.
FLICKR IMAGES: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ibm_research_zurich/sets/72157629212636619
VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zU7KNRpn6coWhen the SKA is completed, it will collect Big Data from deep space containing information dating back to the Big Bang more than 13 billion years ago. The aperture arrays and dishes of the SKA will produce 10 times the global internet traffic*, but the power to process all of this data as it is collected far exceeds the capabilities of the current state-of-the-art technology.
Just in case you are interested in “big data” writ large. 😉
There will be legacy data from optical and radio astronomy instruments, to say nothing of the astronomical literature, to curate along side this data tsunami.