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Radio astronomy always needs more bandwidth. International arrays like LOFAR or the SKA pathfinders generate a comparable amount of information/second as the en
by superkuh 4y ago
Radio astronomy always needs more bandwidth. International arrays like LOFAR or the SKA pathfinders generate a comparable amount of information/second as the entire internet. They could definitely benefit from small scale production of extremely high bandwidth optical networking components.
- walrus01 4y agothe main problem with massive data transfer from radio astronomy sites to other places is not throughput in fiber, but economically purchasing transport capacity from carrier-of-carrier ISPs to get it from the place where the radio telescopes are at, to various research labs and datacenters. radio telescopes tend to be located in very remote places with very few dedicated dark fiber options. from the perspective of somebody in the ISP business, go try to buy a 100GbE transport circuit from $random_radio_astronomy_telescope_site to a meet-me room/traffic exchange point at a major internet infrastructure site.... you're going to run into economic problems really quick.
- superkuh 4y agoI was thinking more interconnects between the FFT/channelizer/correlation boards and the storage that are currently 100 GbE or the like. But now that I think about it it's probably not the interconnect cost that limits things, but storage.