SKA

March 4th, 2008 Matt

I spent my evening at an Astronomy Group of WA (AGWA) meeting listening to an excellent, although high level, presentation on the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) by Peter Quinn from the University of Western Australia. The Square Kilometer Array is a huge array of radio telescopes that will be built in the next 10 years or so in either South Africa or outback Western Australia.

I have been listening to talks about the SKA for a couple of years now but this was the first talk that put the scale of the enterprise in to perspective.

For example, a raindrop striking the ground produces about 1 joule of energy. The amount of energy that has been detected by all of the current radio telescopes together over their entire lifetimes is 0.0001 joules, one ten thousandth of the energy produced by a drop of water hitting the ground. A small test version of the SKA, the pathfinder that will start construction next year, will collect that much energy within 6 months.

The SKA itself will produce an exabyte of data per day. An exabyte is a 1,000,000,000 gigabytes and is the amount of data that is currently produced on the Earth in a year.

I’ll say that again. The SKA will produce as much information per day as all of the Earth’s computers currently produce in a year.

The computer required to process all this information will require 350MWatts of power to run.

The kinds of storage, networking and processing that are going to be required don’t yet exist. Hopefully they will by the time the SKA is built, perhaps the SKA will drive their creation.

However, what really brought it home to me was a computer generated animation of what it will be like to drive up to the SKA. I had a moment when it suddenly hit me how enormous an undertaking this thing is going to be.

And hopefully it’ll be going on in my back yard.

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