Posted on 01/29/2010 11:05:43 AM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach
During our preparation for recently held nVidia GPU Technology Conference, we encountered a session named "Diesel-powered GPU Computing: Enabling a Real-Time Radio Telescope in the Australian Outback." The title intrigued us and after seeing a keynote by Hanspeter Fister from Harvard University - we are quite encouraged with what we saw.
All the talk about supercomputers and thousands of central or graphics processors is nice, but what if you need TFLOPS of compute power for analyzing data 500 miles from civilization. Yes, with no power in sight, the only power is a good old trusty diesel engine that is capable of outputting 20 KiloWatts of power. Now, the question "why would you need TFLOPS of computing power in the middle of nowhere" comes with quite a simple answer: "We, humans - ARE the reason."
Listening to the Universe courtesy of MWA
Unfortunately, our inter-connected world brought scientists to their knees as far as necessity for listening to the Universe is considered. In order to "listen to space", scientists today need powerful radio telescopes that can penetrate through Earth's atmosphere and filter out all the "junk" we manufacture throughout tens of thousands of AM, FM radio, cellphone, TV, Wi-Fi and other signals. To make irony bigger, it turns out that the most efficient spectrum we need to use to listen to space is exactly the overcrowded AM and FM spectrum.
This is also the reason why the location of Radio telescopes is usually "in the middle of nowhere". Currently, scientists rely on a very small number of installations around the world, such as ...
(Excerpt) Read more at brightsideofnews.com ...
fyi
Looks like the work of some real scientist and engineers, not the kind one finds at the CRU and IPCC.
Brings back memories. I used to design interferometer arrays like these. We didn’t have the computing power to directly digitize the IF and process it, though...
Somehow it occurs to me that the likes of Michael Mann and Phil Jones [+ a few thousand other enviropanzies] wouldn't want to be associated with any experiment that required a diesel engine!!
I can just see them going "euwwwwwww, diesel?"
heh heh. Good point!
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