The Murchison Widfield Array is perfectly placed in the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory, far away from radio signals that could overpower the weak whispers it is receiving from space.
Credit: Paul Bourke and Jonathan Knispel. Supported by WASP (UWA), iVEC, ICRAR, and CSIRO.
SYDNEY: The bid to host the world's largest radio telescope is heating up, with researchers in Australia and New Zealand pinning down new technology that can quickly process extreme amounts of data created by new generation radio telescopes.
Curtin University in Perth and Victoria University in Wellington have jointly received a supercomputer facility, which will be hosted at Curtin University and was donated by computing giant IBM.
The computer system will enable real time imaging of the cosmos, which could help bolster Australia-New Zealand's bid to host the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), a 3000-dish radio telescope that will be 50 times more powerful than current radio telescopes, researchers said.
Processing vast amount of data
While the site for the SKA has yet to be chosen, the new supercomputer will collect and image data from the Murchison Widefield Array telescope, an array of 512 'tiles' that will form a test bed for SKA technology.
"One of the real difficulties with telescopes of the future is the vast amounts of data that need to be processed, stored, analysed and then distributed back out to researchers around the world," said Victoria University of Wellington astronomer Melanie Johnston-Hollitt.
Johnston-Hollitt, chair of the New Zealand SKA Research and Development Consortium, has spearheaded an effort to increase New Zealand's involvement in the Murchison Widefield Array and hopes this will translate to an increased role in the SKA.
New Zealand looking for action
The supercomputer is the first component provided to an Australian precursor telescope by a New Zealand institution and represents a step forward in the country's engagement with the SKA project, said Johnston-Hollitt.
"We here in New Zealand do not just want to be real estate for the SKA stations," said Sergei Gulyaev, an astronomer at Auckland University of Technology.
"We have worked very hard to re-establish the country's radioastronomy foundations over the last six years and now have experienced young people capable of operating radio telescopes and doing world-class research."
Big telescopes need speedy flops
The SKA will link thousands of antennas across a continent-wide geographic area, and with survey speeds 10,000 times faster than present-day radio telescopes will require a supercomputer capable of processing one 'exaflop' per second.
This is a computational speed that does not yet exist, one which is capable of performing 1,000 million billion operations per second.
