The SKA or Square Kilometre Array is going to be the fastest and most sensitive radio telescope ever built and good old magnetic tape is the storage medium of choice.
The array will consist of 3,000 dish antennas each about 15 meters in diameter and is being built in Australia and Southern Africa. The antennas in Africa will be arranged in five spiral arms with the furthest end of the arms being 3,000 kilometers from the center of the array.
The amount of data the SKA will create is 10 times the network traffic produced on the global internet in the same time period and will send 10 petabits (1 billion GB) of data to a central supercomputer each second.
That’s enough data to fill 15 million 64GB iPods per day and would take two million years to playback on that iPod. With that much data coming in each second, ASTRON (Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy) looked to IBM to handle the exascale computer system and the data storage. IBM then looked to its expansive knowledge of magnetic tape for the data storage solution.
Current tape cartridges (LTO6) can hold 6 terabytes of data, but IBM hopes the new cartridge for the SKA will hold 128 terabytes of data. IBM’s Zurich research laboratory has already created a tape that will hold 29.6GB of data per square inch of tape and the next milestone is hoped to be 100GB per square inch in order to reach their goal of a whopping 128TB per cartridge. The tapes will be housed in robotic libraries with the current tech of 250MBPS throughput, which should be fast enough. The Zurich lab still has some time to sort things out as construction of SKA does not start until 2016 and will take four years. The IBM supercomputer should come online in 2024.