Professor Sergei Gulyaev looks at New Zealand's chances of winning joint hosting rights for a major astronomy project coming in 2012.
"The Square Kilometre Array (SKA),an international science project to build a massive radio telescope comprised of thousands of radio telescope dishes spread over large distances,promises a new era in space exploration.
Australia and New Zealand are working together in a bid to host the SKA which will be the world's most powerful telescope; capable of 'seeing' the farthest reaches of the universe.
If the Australasian bid is successful (the decision will be announced in 2012),the AUT Institute for Radio Astronomy and Space Research will play a major role. AUT's radio telescope dish,situated north of Auckland,may become one of the dishes making up the SKA telescope which will be centred in Western Australia.
Ten years from now,the SKA will still be several years away from completion (due in 2023) but the mammoth task of collecting data will already have begun.
If the SKA is based in Australasia my hope is that there will be two or three SKA stations in New Zealand - with 20 to 30 dishes - one in the North Island and one in the South Island.
The benefits that the SKA will bring to astronomical research are enormous (observation of the first galaxies,stars and quasars,being able to look back in time to the beginning of the universe,to name a few) but the areas of computer performance and mathematical science will see breakthrough gains.
SKA will still require Exascale computing,which means systems that can handle a million million million calculations per second. To put that in perspective,IBM's 'Roadrunner' system,the fastest machine running,has a peak performance of one Petaflop. An Exaflop is 1000 times faster than a Petaflop.
I hope that our progress will be not only in terms of extensive development - bigger and bigger in size - but also in terms of intensive development. New mathematical algorithms and theorems will be developed to reduce this Exascale requirement by orders of magnitude.
Much of this knowledge will also be used for other areas of scientific research - such as climate,medical and geosciences - that require very high performance computing.
These critical requirements for high performance computing are the reason AUT has chosen to place its new astronomy major within the Bachelor of Mathematical Sciences programme and the School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences.
SKA will need people with knowledge of mathematics and computing as well as radio astronomy. The development of software for SKA alone will require as many as 500 people-years of programming work."
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