SoylentNews

janrinok writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The world's largest radio telescope is one step closer, with Australian scientists putting the final touches on the build for the Square Kilometre Array in the remote West Australian desert.

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is an ambitious international project that will see the world's largest radio telescope built across two continents, capable of imaging huge areas of the sky at a resolution surpassing the Hubble telescope. The SKA will include more than 100,000 low-frequency antennas in Australia and hundreds of dishes in South Africa, all working together to create a total collecting area of 1 square kilometre.

[...] "We're setting the groundwork to host 132,000 low-frequency SKA antennas in Australia. These will receive staggering amounts of data," said CSIRO SKA infrastructure consortium director, Antony Schinckel.

"The data flows will be on the scale of petabits, or a million billion bits, per second -- more than the global internet rate today, all flowing into a single building."

All that data requires its own infrastructure, including 65,000 fibre optic cables to transfer the data from the antennas to the SKA's supercomputing facilities.

Original Submission