ASTRONOMY

The Square Kilometer Array (SKA), proposed to be operational in 2020, will be capable of observations that are two orders of magnitude more sensitive than those from existing meter- and centimeter-wavelength facilities; this increase in sensitivity will require a data collection area of a square kilometer—50 times larger than the current Very Large Array. SKA will address fundamental questions about the origin and evolution of the universe. "The major breakthrough is that it adds so much more sensitivity than any radio telescope that exists today," said Athol Kemball, a researcher at the University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). "It allows you to look at neutral hydrogen from the present time to the very distant cosmic past. You can study how galaxies and cosmological structures form in the universe." Kemball will lead the project's calibration and processing team, including individuals from Cornell, MIT, the Naval Research Lab, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, University of New Mexico, the University of Calgary, and the University of California at Berkeley. This group will address the computing challenges associated with deriving images from such a massive array. "There is petascale computing involved to form an image from the raw data taken by the telescope," Kemball explained. "There's a lot of research that has to go on there to see how these array designs would perform at that scale." The computational processing is so important to this project, that some people call it a "software telescope," he added. "It's a telescope in which petascale software will be central to its scientific success." NCSA is collaborating with the astronomy community on the data needs of several major projects, including the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope and the Dark Energy Survey.