COMMISSIONED supercomputer ALMA
Last Wednesday, the official opening ceremony of the Astronomical Observatory of the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile. Now an array of telescopes being built as part of an international project is already 59 radio antennas, and by the time of completion, scheduled for October, and their number will be increased to 66. Correlation antennas combined into a single radio interferometer with which scientists hope to obtain new data that explain the mechanisms of evolution of the universe, rests with the supercomputer.
Specialized supercomputer system Atacama Compact Array (ACA) Correlator, developed by specialists from Fujitsu and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), was put into operation simultaneously with the opening of ALMA.
The configuration includes 35 supercomputer Fujitsu Primergy servers on x86-compatible processors and a dedicated computer. It consists of an array of blocks in 4096 FPGA, connected by fiber optic connections in 1024. The system meets the strict requirements of the project, including the ability to perform real-time processing of 512 billion every second counts signal (about 200 GB / s), which corresponds to the performance of 120 trillion. operations per second.
According to the developers, the supercomputer, located at an altitude of 5000 m above sea level (pressure 0.5 bar) to be self-responsible for processing the data with 16 antennas. Given the fact that in such circumstances the work of maintenance personnel is difficult, hardware diagnostics, software updates and other tasks are performed remotely - from Japan or the base camp of researchers located in Chile at an altitude of 2900 m above sea level.
