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Comment by robin_reala | Hacker News Reader

Current systems for handling data would be unable to cope with the demands of the SKA and it is hoped technology will catch up by the time it is completed.

You’ve got to love optimistic engineering!

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It worked for the LHC - http://wlcg-public.web.cern.ch/about

Several of my friends worked on the bid for south africa and the volume of data they they were talking about is astounding. Another friend of mine is working on the forked nix os that they are building to run all this, very very interesting,lots of interesting computing. Lots of phd and post doc CS and EE work being done around this in South Africa.

Interestingly the algo which they use to process the data is very simple, several nested loops (trying to find the paper now one of my friends on the project sent me yielded no results), but this algo obivously has to run on masses of data and massively parallel.

The part that needs the most optimism is the provision of the connectivity to the section in South Africa, which is unfortunately a political challenge instead of an engineering challenge.

Relying on Moore's law-like as caling is becoming standard practice in big science. Someday it'll stop working, but there's plentry of evidence to suggest that tooling will continue to improve on timescales of a decade.

Not the first time it's been done.

Of course, it's only worked some of the time it's been done, I guess.

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