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China is planning another petaflop supercomputer, this time to support what will by next year become the world's largest radiotelescope.
The telescope itself, a 500 metre monster that's scooped into a hilltop in Guizhou, has been under construction since 2011.
This week, engineers began installing the 4,450 panels that will make up the FAST (Five hundred metre Aperture Spherical Telescope) facility, which the Middle Kingdom's Academy of Sciences reckons will be able to detect radio signals from more than ten billion light years' distance.
More importantly, its huge size will also mean FAST can pick up even fainter signals than those captured at today's biggest radiotelescope, the [300 metre] Arecibo Radio Observatory in Puerto Rico.
Xinhua reports that the instrument will be supported by Skyeye-1, a petaflop facility that'll connect to FAST with 100 Gbps links.
The Institute of Computing Technology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences(CASICT), Dawning Information Industry Co and China (Guizhou) Skyeye Group will build what's to be called the Qiannan Super Computing Center in Guizhou.
FAST's daily peak demand is predicted to exceed 200 teraflops, with first stage storage of more than 10 petabytes, CASICT researcher Zhang Peiheng told the state-run news agency.
More information at Wikipedia; arXiv.org has the 2011 abstract and full PDF.
(Score: 1, Troll) by bob_super on Friday July 31 2015, @10:40PM
Why do they spend so much taxpayer money on something so useless? If they pulled their noses out of their flawed "scientific" papers, they'd quickly notice the real beauty of the stars shining down on them from 6000 light-years away. And they could invest all that money in proper aircraft carriers instead.