PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD
PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD Many organizations and businesses are turning to cloud computing for its time- and money-saving benefits. Now, a massive cloud-computing project could support a new radio telescope—allowing for major scientific breakthroughs and public access to data.
Australia and South Africa are currently competing to house Square Kilometer Array (SKA), which would be the world's most sensitive radio telescope and cost over $2.1 billion. It would also be the world's largest radio telescope, with thousands of radio dishes spread over hundreds of acres. Goals of the telescope include exploring the origins of the universe, dark matter, black holes and general relativity.
As a part of its bid, Australia has proposed a cloud-computing project to help store and process data collected by the telescope. Researchers from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) and iVEC, the company behind super-computing performance at Pawsey Centre at CSIRO, proposed the cloud project, named "theskynet."
Researchers believe that exaflop-capable supercomputers will be required to analyze the huge amounts of information gathered by the telescope. The Pawsey Centre, once completed in 2013, should be able to complete petaflop computing. Its initial stages, which include a GPU-based processing center, should be capable of delivering an exabyte of raw data per day.
Even with this supercomputer, the data would be impractical—if not impossible—to store. While public, multitenanted cloud-computing platforms (like Amazon Web Service's EC2 storage platform) were suggested, these would be highly expensive to operate.
As an alternative, researchers tested a cloud platform with 200 users at the University of Western Australia, Curtin University and iVEC, with two servers from the NereusCloud domain. University campuses are an ideal setting for the information, since they already have powerful computers and high-bandwidth fibers. They also house the scientists most likely to need the information.
Researchers from Oxford University developed the Nereus platform for the cloud-computing effort, which has a Java base and greater security than similar platforms, like BOINC.
Peter Quinn, director of the Australia-New Zealand SKA project, hopes to see the cloud effort also undertaken by the general public.
“We're keen to expose the datasets to the public,” he told ComputerWorld. “You get a multiplication of the science [utilization] and science return on this data.”
Cloud-based storage also has environmental benefits over supercomputers, which require large amounts of power to operate.
If Australia is awarded the SKA project, it could become the scientific community's largest cloud-computing network, giving researchers and citizens alike access to groundbreaking discoveries.
Correction: The original version of this story noted that the two locations in contention to house the telescope are Australia and South America. That second location is actually South Africa.
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