IBM puts Blue Gene to work on Big Bang

IBM plans to put some of its big iron to work next year to help a Dutch astronomy lab construct a radio telescope that scientists hope will let them gaze deeply enough into space to study the moments surrounding the universe's creation.

The Netherlands Foundation for Research in Astronomy (Astron), in Dwingeloo, has been working for several years toward a radio telescope project known as Lofar. Lofar, which stands for "Low Frequency Array," will use thousands of radio antennas spread over several hundred miles to detect cosmic signals -- including those from objects so distant their radio signals are believed to have been emitted just after the Big Bang.

"The big problem with existing telescopes is that they only look in one direction at a time," said Harvey Butcher, Astron's executive director. "Lofar will be able to see the whole sky."

Logging data from scanning the whole sky takes dramatic processing power and throughput, which is where Big Blue steps in. Because deep astronomical research usually requires supercomputers more advanced than any available commercially, scientists are accustomed to building their own machines. But, in a bid to control its costs, Astron decided more than a year ago to look for a commercial partner for Lofar's computing needs. IBM responded with a pitch for Blue Gene, the family of supercomputers IBM intends to be the world's most advanced.

In the works for several years, IBM's first wave of Blue Gene/L machines are scheduled for release in mid-2005. The series' high-profile patriarch will be a system ordered by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, featuring 64 refrigerator-sized racks capable of processing more than 350 teraflops per second -- not far off the total computing power of the top 500 supercomputers in the world today.

In terms of processing power, Astron's Blue Gene/L will be the baby of the family, with six racks. That's still enough to lodge Lofar on the top-10 list of the world's supercomputers. And it's in bandwidth that Lofar will surpass its siblings, according to Bill Pulleyblank, IBM Research's director of exploratory server systems.

"We took the same type of Blue Gene we're building for the Livermore lab and we reconfigured it to get a lot more I/O (input/output) bandwidth into it," Pulleyblank said. "That was the design challenge. Although it's much smaller in the number of processors, we increased its data-handling capacity."

Lofar will have as much as 20 terabytes of data flowing through its pipes each second, he said. That's enough data to encode more than 3,000 music CDs.

Astron's Butcher said his group's goals are right at the edge of what modern computing technology permits.

"There's a whole period in the early universe where people don't know what happened. We're hoping that Lofar will be the first telescope that will be able to see the first objects being formed. Maybe, with a bit of luck, we'll see what they are," he said.

Astron aims to have Lofar running by 2006 -- a deadline imposed not by scientists or bureaucracy but by nature. Radiation from the sun disturbs the incoming radio waves Lofar will detect. In 2006, the sun will be at a low ebb in its 11-year activity cycle, a window Butcher said Astron hopes to exploit so it can work the kinks out of Lofar during a quiet period.

Astronomy will be the project's main focus, but other scientists may queue up to take advantage of the system's processing and data-gathering resources. Butcher envisions attaching other devices -- such as seismic, wind, and weather sensors -- to Lofar's antennas, allowing researchers in other fields to pursue their own initiatives.

"We see this project as a technology platform that is much broader than just astronomy," Butcher said. "It should be very exciting."

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