'Brain' of world's largest radio telescope designed

Scientists at Cambridge have finished designing the 'brain' of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), the world's largest radio telescope.

When complete, the SKA will enable astronomers to monitor the sky in unprecedented detail and survey the entire sky much faster than any system currently in existence, researchers said.

The SKA's Science Data Processor (SDP) consortium has concluded its engineering design work, marking the end of five years' work to design one of two supercomputers that will process the enormous amounts of data produced by the SKA's telescopes.

"We estimate SDP's total compute power to be around 250 PFlops -- that's 25 per cent faster than IBM's Summit, the current fastest supercomputer in the world," said Maurizio Miccolis, SDP's Project Manager for the SKA Organisation.

"In total, up to 600 petabytes of data will be distributed around the world every year from SDP -- enough to fill more than a million average laptops," he said.

The SDP consortium, led by the ...