The world's most powerful supercomputer will soon lose that title to the next challenger.
Scientists have completed the design of the first of two supercomputers designed for joint work, called the "scientific data processor" (OND). Together, these computers will be able to process the vast amounts of data collected by the "square kilometer antenna system" (ASKK), a network of radio telescopes in Perth, Australia and Cape Town, South Africa.
An international team of researchers from 11 countries worked for five years to create the hardware and software for this machine.
Two such supercomputers (installed in Perth and Cape Town) are expected to be able to process 600 petabytes of data annually (petabytes equals one million gigabytes), "enough to fill a million regular laptops," says Maurizio Micciolis, OND project manager.
How fast will the new supercomputer be? The speed of computers is measured in terms of the number of floating point operations performed per second - "flops". Supercomputer performance is measured in petaflops - quadrillion (million billion) operations per second. By comparison, the speed of conventional personal computers is expressed in gigaflops - billions of operations per second.
The OND is expected to reach 250 petaflops, or 250 quadrillion operations per second, and is 25% faster than IBM's Summit computer, the fastest supercomputer to date.
Moving at record speed the huge amounts of information collected by the radio telescope, the supercomputer will analyze the information in near real time, separating useful signals from noise.
“OND turns data into information,” says Rosie Bolton, an employee of ASKK data center. "This is where the collected data makes sense and is transformed into high-resolution astronomical images."
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Author: Vadim Tarabarko