Supercomputer Has An Eye On The Sky

greenspun.com : LUSENET : Unk's Wild Wild West : One Thread

http://biz.yahoo.com/fo/001122/1122supercomputer.html

Wednesday November 22, 12:03 am Eastern Time

Forbes.com

Supercomputer Has An Eye On The Sky

By David Einstein

Mars attacks? Not if IBM can help it. The number-one computer maker said today that the U.S. government has begun using one of its newest supercomputers to identify telescope images of everything from UFOs to space junk.

The announcement marks the latest win for IBM (NYSE: IBM - news), which has been on a supercomputing kick since one of its RS/6000s beat the pants off chess champion Garry Kasparov three years ago. According to a list compiled by the University of Tennessee and Germany's University of Mannheim, Big Blue now has 215 of the top 500 supercomputing sites in the world, including the fastest machine of all, ASCI White, which is simulating nuclear explosions at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif.

For its latest feat of supercomputer daring-do, IBM has installed a service provider system featuring 320 copper-based processors, 224 gigabytes of memory and 2.9 terabytes of disk storage at the Maui High Performance Computing Center (MHPCC) in Hawaii. Its job will be to take images from powerful telescopes located high on the Haleakala volcano and render them into detailed photos, or turn a sequence of images into full-motion video.

The Air Force plans to use the system to locate and track objects in orbit around the Earth. That's a tall order considering there are more than 9,000 objects buzzing around up there. Most of them are working or obsolete satellites, but there's also a plethora of space junk including gloves and screwdrivers left behind by astronauts in a hurry to get home.

Gene Bal, director of the MHPCC, thinks the new supercomputer is up to the task: ``It looks very fast and capable,'' he says. Indeed, at 480 calculations per second, the system needs less than five seconds to turn a blurry telescopic image into a Kodak moment. Special software for handling the complex algorithms involved (this takes more than PhotoShop) has been developed by a partnership of universities and companies including Boeing (NYSE: BA - news) and Textron (NYSE: TXT - news).

In addition to scouring the heavens, the Maui supercomputer will earn its keep by analyzing close-up images of damage to spacecraft, making it easier to determine the need for repairs. Theoretically, it also could identity an object hurtling toward Earth with destruction in mind, such as an errant comet or nasty asteroid.

Bal cited a variety of other uses for the new supercomputer, which replaces an older IBM system that had 192 processors. Maui scientists may get the chance to explore fluid dynamics, virtually design cars or even simulate underground oil reservoirs.

Bal acknowledged, however, that most of the number crunching would involve defense projects. Just who might attack us from space is unclear, but if ET decides to invade, we'll have him pegged.

-- (Forbes@dot.com), January 27, 2001

Answers

"by David Einstein". Sure.

-- (Niels Bohr@Kopenhagen.Dansk), January 27, 2001.

Moderation questions? read the FAQ