HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING
Life, the universe and computing
ROBERT ROE REPORTS FROM THE SC17 CONFERENCE KEYNOTE, DETAILING PROGRESS ON THE SQUARE KILOMETRE ARRAY PROJECT
The keynote for this year’s SC17 conference, the largest supercomputing conference in
the USA, held this year in Denver, Colorado covered the progress made by the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project. The presentation highlighted the need to leverage HPC to solve grand scientific challenges facing humanity. On Tuesday 14 November two of the
researchers for the Square Kilometre Array described the SKA’s international partnership, which will map and study the entire sky in greater detail than ever before in the conferences keynote address.
Underpinning the world’s largest and most powerful array of radio telescopes is a computing system that can process and manage the huge amounts of data generated – approximately 10 petabytes per day.
Philip Diamond, director general of SKA
and Rosie Bolton, SKA regional centre project scientist and project scientist for the international engineering consortium designing the high performance computing systems used in the project, took to the stage to highlight the huge requirements for computation and data processing required by the SKA project. ‘SKA is an exascale science project
8 Scientific Computing World December 2017/January 2018
that will push forward the boundaries of scientific endeavour and engineering capability for decades to come,’ stated Bolton. The presentation then opened with a
short video that described some of the ambitious scientific questions that could be answered based on data gathered from the SKA. What are gravitational waves? How does magnetism work throughout the universe? How are planets formed? What is dark matter? What is our history? While the SKA cannot solve all of these challenges alone, the data it provides will enable researchers to study events such as the formation of planets and galaxies far into the history of the universe. ‘We are building a time machine. We are
going to look at what our surroundings were like almost at their inception,’ said Bolton.
History of the SKA The first concepts for the SKA began in September 1993 when the International Union of Radio Science (URSI) established the Large Telescope Working Group to begin a worldwide effort to develop the scientific goals and technical specifications for a large radio observatory. The working group provided a forum for
discussing the technical research required and for mobilising a broad scientific community to cooperate in achieving this common goal. The two keynote presenters explained that the initial concept for the Square Kilometer Array was for a so called hydrogen array – a telescope sensitive enough to detect the signals from the dark ages of the universe 13 billion years ago.
“We are building a time machine. We are going to look at what our surroundings were like almost at their inception”
In 1997, eight institutions from six
countries; Australia, Canada, China, India, the Netherlands, and the USA signed an agreement to cooperate in a technology study programme leading to a future very large radio telescope. What followed was a long period of planning and developing agreements between the contributing countries and organisations leading to the creation of the SKA Organisation, a not-for-profit company established in December 2011 to formalise relationships between the international partners and lead the project. ‘Twenty-four years after the initial
concept the SKA is an international project funded by 10 countries, bringing together more than 100 engineers and scientists from 270 institutions across 20 countries,’ added Bolton.
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www.scientific-computing.com
SKATelescope.org
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