Supercomputer eavesdrops on universe
Europe's biggest supercomputer will crunch data from thousands of radio antennae eavesdropping on the history of the universe, its Dutch developers and U.S. computer giant IBM said on Tuesday.
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 (ASTRON) said.
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.
