Supercomputer to analyze space signals

Europe’s biggest supercomputer will crunch data from thousands of radio antennas eavesdropping on the history of the universe, its Dutch developers and IBM say.

The computer, based in the northern Netherlands, will process signals from up to 13 billion light years from Earth — as far back in time as the beginnings of the earliest stars and galaxies after the formation of the universe.

“Unlike current observatories that use large optical mirrors or radio dishes to point to distant galaxies, ASTRON will harness more than 25,000 simple radio antennas,” IBM and Netherlands Foundation for Research in Astronomy, or ASTRON, announced Tuesday.

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Running on 12,000 PowerPC microprocessors, the computer can execute 27.4 Teraflops, or 27.4 trillion floating-point operations, per second, the two organizations said in a statement.

While that makes it Europe’s most powerful computer in terms of sustained performance and ahead of Barcelona’s MareNostrum, the world’s biggest computer remains the U.S.-based BlueGene with a capacity of 70.1 Teraflops, according to the Top500 supercomputer ranking.

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The new computer will consume 150 kilowatts of power — the equivalent of 2,500 60-watt light bulbs — which is considered economical for a supercomputer, IBM said.

“This a very low-power device,” an IBM spokesman said.

It will form the heart of a new type of radio telescope developed by ASTRON, and gather and analyze information from ASTRON’s Low Frequency Array “software telescope” network.