Big Bang to be plumbed by supercomputer

February 24, 2004 | Source: EE Times

IBM’ s Blue Gene/L supercomputer will support a radio astronomy attempt to view the earliest epoch of the universe 13 billion years ago, possibly the first stars and the first fragments of galaxies to emerge after the Big Bang.

The system will be used by Astron, an astronomy organization in the Netherlands. The signal-processing algorithm will require the computer to crunch around 700 Gbits of data per second from 10,000 small low-frequency radio antennas. Blue Gene/L at 34 teraflops represents the current computing level of the project, which is expected to reach a petaflops goal sometime next year.