Image credit – Ilana Feain, Tim Cornwell & Ron Ekers (CSIRO/ATNF). ATCA northern middle lobe pointing courtesy R. Morganti (ASTRON), Parkes data courtesy N. Junkes (MPIfR). Photo of the ATCA and Moon: Shaun Amy, CSIRO.
ASKAP, the CSIRO says, will give astronomers remarkable insights into the formation of the early universe and to test theories of cosmic magnetism and predictions from Einstein's theory of relativity.
ASKAP will comprise an array of 36 antennas each 12-metres in diameter, capable of high dynamic range imaging and using wide-field-of-view phased array feeds, currently under development by the CSIRO.
“The problem with current radio telescopes is that they can only see a narrow field of view, so if you want to image the entire sky you have to make about 100,000 ‘pointings’ and that’s just too slow,” Cornwell says.
Using ASKAP, an image of the entire sky in could be produced in just three or four hours, allowing researchers to produce a new map every night showing changes day by day.
“You could also survey all the neutral hydrogen in the nearby galaxies over the course of a year to give you a census of all the galaxies in our neighbourhood,” Cornwell says. “That’s important for understanding the local structure of the universe.”
According to the CSIRO, in one week ASKAP will generate more information than is currently contained on the whole World Wide Web; in one month it will generate more information than is contained in the world's academic libraries.
To handle the phenomenal amount of data the Pathfinder will generate -- expected to be about 20 petabytes per year -- the CSIRO will look to deploy a 100 teraflop cluster based in either Perth or Geraldton, Cornwell says.
“Much of the processing we do is embarrassingly parallel, so for this application we don’t need a lot of interconnect,” he says. “With a dedicated supercomputer you are largely paying for high speed interconnect. We just want the overall processing capability.”
If Australia is successful in its bid for the Square Kilometre Array, then it will look to deploy an exaflop worth of processing power to handle the additional load, Cornwell says.
Much of the software being used to manage the collection and processing of the raw data from the Pathfinder and ASKAP is being written in-house with C++ and MPI.
However, for the telescope monitoring software, the CSIRO is using EPICS -- a set of open source software tools and applications which provide a software infrastructure for use in building distributed control systems to operate devices such as particle accelerators and major telescopes
For connectivity, a dedicated fibre link, being built by the CSIRO and managed by AARNet, will connect the telescope site at Boolardy, WA to the CSIRO at its Geraldton facility. The National Broadband Network will then link Geraldton to Perth and wider Australian and international networks.
As reported by CIO in June, Australia is also leading astronomic research with the SkyMapper observatory, tasked with scanning the night skies to create the Southern Sky Survey.
A deep digital map of the southern sky, the Southern Sky Survey -- with a little help from the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) National Facility -- will allow astronomers to study interstellar objects ranging from nearby asteroids to super-distant objects like quasars.
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