Bandwidth bonanza from SKA radio telescope

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 04 October 2006 13:17

Business IT - Networking

According to Big Pipes "The SKA will have both unprecedented sensitivity (approximately 100 times better than any existing radio telescope) and unprecedented survey capabilities. As a consequence of these capabilities, the output datasets from the SKA will be vast. Many telescopes record over a terabyte of data per night and the SKA telescope will have an effective collecting area more than 30 times greater than the largest existing telescope."

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Big Pipes suggested that, if the raw data were sent abroad, the international connectivity required would be around 100Gbps with bursts up to 1Tbps. Processing the images locally and sending images could reduce this to 10Gbps with bursts up to 100Gbps. "This single use is equivalent to Australia’s current entire use of international connectivity," it claimed.

Big Pipes calculates current bandwidth as being 365Gbps equipped of which 115Gbps is active. This is split between four cables: Australia-Japan and Southern Cross (Australia to the US), both from the East Coast, and Jasaurus and Sea-Me-We-3 Linking Austral to Asia from the West Coast. According to Big Pipes if all these cables were upgraded to their maximum design capacity, total bandwidth would increase to 1.56tbps.

Big Pipes adds that, even without the SKA, the xNTD telescope (which is proceeding) will generate significant bandwidth demand. "The 'correlator' will compare data across 20 antennae and the resulting product will need global connectivity of 1Gbps allowing for bursts up to 10Gbps. This represents a significant level of demand for global connectivity out of Western Australia."

A related aspect of SKA's prodigious data output is storage. According to Big Pipes round one percent (tens or million of dollars) of the cost of the SKA telescope facility is likely to be spent on storage. "Apart from being required on a long-term basis for archive and retrieval, storage can also play a significant short-term role in substituting for higher bandwidth. That is, the same amount of data can be transported over a longer period from storage using slower connection speeds."