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AUSTRALIAN GRID PROJECT HOPES TO PROPEL SPACE EXPLORATION

Swinburne University of Technology's astronomy department is developing a project to propel space exploration with new computing technology. The electronic Very Long Baseline Interferometry (eVLBI) project will begin this month with the addition of a third cluster at Narrabri, New South Wales. Existing supercomputers perform in Swinburne, Victoria and Parkes, New South Wales.

eVLBI involves combining signals from two separate locations to synthesize a telescope that is the size of the baseline.

Researchers hope the project will enable Western Australia to house the world- wide Square Kilometer Array (SKA) telescope, with an area 30 times that of the largest built previously.

Experts believe the SKA telescope will transform and improve current astronomical initiatives worldwide.

The United States and Australia are currently competing for SKA hosting rights, though Australia has the best chance of getting a site for the telescope.

The location of the SKA telescope will depend on the quality of the site and engineering leadership. Australia researchers believe the Western Australia site is perfect due to its lack of radio interference. And, by collaborating internationally, Australia hopes to solve new technological problems to power the project properly.

The SKA telescope would need around 2 petaflops of power to operate. So far, clusters have been installed in three sites, but the plan is for six locations with a separate cluster in each, with one likely to be in Western Australia. To process the vast amounts of data that are generated at multiple locations around the country, many computers could be placed at each site, or one larger computer placed at a "central" location with all data being sent there.

Problems arise when data needs to be recorded because all of the data can't always be transmitted. Researchers are left with multiple choices. One involves using storage at each location and sending the data home in a large clump. The other involves installing limited processing systems at each site to process the data before it is sent, or they can be used as a larger part of big cluster of computers, a form of Grid processing.

The software that will run over the Grid is currently being developed and will essentially process data from the radio telescopes.

Priority goals include near-real-time VLBI processing using Grid computing and networking to distribute data among different sites for processing.

Though the radio telescopes owned by the CSIRO ATNF have 512Kb per second second connections, astronomers hope the AARNET3 regional network will supply 1Gb per second by the end of the year with possible expansion to 10Gb per second.