14 DAY TRIAL // IBM already has a fairly big stake in the HPC and data center markets, but it is going to become even more prominent in the field by 2024, if its recent contract with ASTRON goes as planned.
IBM has been commissioned by the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON) to research and develop an exascale supercomputer.
An exabyte is one quintillion bytes, where a quintillion is a 1 with 18 zeros at the end.
This basically amounts to twice the data quantity produced on the whole Internet in a day.
With that to provide perspective, we can move on to the relevant bit: the conglomerate that IBM has been tasked with creating will process one exabyte of data each day (that means read it, store it and analyze it).
“If you take the current global daily Internet traffic and multiply it by two, you are in the range of the data set that the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope will be collecting every day,”says Ton Engbersen with IBM Research – Zurich.
“This is Big Data Analytics to the extreme. With DOME we will embark on one of the most data intensive science projects ever planned, which will eventually have much broader applications beyond radio astronomy research.”
The entire SKA Project is going to cost $2 billion, or thereabouts (just short of 1.50 billion Euro). It should be ready to run by 2024 and will probably get a very high spot on the Top500 list, if not the highest.
“Large research infrastructures like the SKA require extremely powerful computer systems to process all the data. The only acceptable way to build and operate these systems is to dramatically reduce their power consumption. DOME gives us unique opportunities to try out new approaches in Green Supercomputing. This will be beneficial for society at large as well,” said Marco de Vos, managing director of ASTRON.