When complete, the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) will be the largest radio telescope array in the entire world. The result of decades of work involving 40 institutions in 11 countries, the SKA will allow astronomers to monitor the sky in unprecedented detail and survey it much faster than with any system currently in existence.
Such a large array will naturally be responsible for gathering an unprecedented amount of data on a regular basis. To sort through all this data, the “brain” for this massive array will consist of two supercomputers. Recently, the SKA’s Science Data Processor (SDP) consortium concluded their engineering design work on one of these supercomputers.
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