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ICRAR’s big data scientists tested data processing algorithms they developed for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) on the world’s most powerful supercomputer.

Summit — Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s 200 petaflop supercomputer. Credit: Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Summit — Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s 200 petaflop supercomputer. Credit: Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Known as Summit and based at the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the supercomputer has a peak performance of 200,000 trillion calculations per second.

In 2019, ICRAR researchers used Summit to process simulated observations of the early Universe ahead of the radio telescope being built in Western Australia and South Africa. They were able to process 400 gigabytes of data a second—the equivalent of more than 1600 hours of standard definition YouTube videos.

The test used a sophisticated piece of software written by ICRAR, called the Data Activated Liu (Flow) Graph Engine (DALiuGE). It was the first time radio astronomy data had been processed on this scale.