IBM and the Dutch radio astronomy institute ASTRON will work together on the building of a new supercomputer that will be capable of doing more than 1 exaflop operations per second (equal to 1 000 000 trillion operations per second).
The new supercomputer will be connected to the world’s largest radio telescope and will be used to analyse data coming from this radio telescope as well as for studying the Big Bang, which created the Universe 13 billion years ago.
Every day the supercomputer will collect, store and analyse an exabyte of data, which is twice as much data as the Internet generates every day. This will become possible thanks to IBM, which will create an energy-efficient technology that will allow such computational power.
The supercomputer is part of the Square Kilometer Array project that aims to create the largest and most sensitive radio telescope in the world. The projected radio telescope will pack the power of three million satellite TV antennas and will occupy three thousand square kilometres. The useful area will be just 1 square kilometre hence the name of the project.
Source: Technews.bg