Cloud computing beckons scientists

Grazed from Nature.com. Author: Nadia Drake.

Sometime in the next decade, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) will open its compound eyes — roughly 2,000 radio dishes divided between sites in South Africa and Australia. The radio telescope will then begin staring into supermassive black holes, searching for the origin of cosmic magnetic fields and seeking clues about the young Universe.

Meanwhile, the telescope’s engineers are struggling to plan for the imminent data deluge. The photons that will stream into the array’s receivers are expected to produce up to 1 exabyte (1018 bytes) of data per day, roughly the amount handled by the entire Internet in 2000. Electricity costs for an on-site computing cluster big enough to process those data could total millions of dollars each year. So the engineers are investigating an increasingly common choice for researchers wrestling with big data: to outsource their computing to the cloud…

“No one’s ever built anything this big before, and we really don’t understand the ins and outs of operating it,” explains SKA architect Tim Cornwell of the Jodrell Bank Observatory near Manchester, UK. He says that cloud systems — which provide on-demand, ‘elastic’ access to shared, remote computing resources — would provide an amount of flexibility for the project that buying dedicated hardware might not…

Read more from the source @ http://www.nature.com/news/cloud-computing-beckons-scientists-1.15298