Of course nobody notices – there's no photo opportunity!
Naturally it has escaped the attention of mainstreammedia...
But, the fact is that two Kiwi IT companies are stillin, and contributing to, the world's largest IT project – the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radiotelescope. (See a press release
here).
Thousands of radio telescopesto be built in Southern Africa and Australia between 2018 and 2024 will monitor and survey space,producing vast amounts of data.
It will require real-timeanalysis of 120 terabytes per second – the equivalent of streaming one million high definitionmovies at once.
This is a massive Big Data project, and will require newdevelopments in both hardware and software.
A team led by
Open Parallel
including
Catalyst IT engineers has devised anddelivered the initial version of the Software Development Plan for how participants in the projectwill develop software and/or firmware to achieve design goals established for theSKA.
Now, Open Parallel's director, Oamaru-based (yes, you've read thatcorrectly) Nicolas Erdody has also been the inspiration and driver behind three
Multicore World conferences (now in itsfourth consecutive edition – Feb 2015, Wellington). These assemblies of global IT heavyweightsare looking how to take advantage of massive computing power available through multicore computers(where there's many many processors on one chip).
So far no one has effectivelycracked how to write the parallel programs (coding) that takes advantage of thispower.
But, by being part of the SKA project, Open Parallel and Catalyst havepositioned themselves to both learn, along with others, and ride the inevitable wave of parallelprogramming, big data, cloud and green computing, and many more state-of-the-arttechnologies.
So what?
Well, if it comes to pass,there will be a huge opportunity for New Zealand to be at the forefront of what will be a whole newbasket of knowledge and technologies around multicore and programming for them.
Theopportunities for our IT sector(s) to be ride this parallel computing wave will be immense – waybigger than the movie industry, with much more potential to branch into differentfields.
Naturally, Erdody and Catalyst IT managing director Don Christie aren'tpart of SKA solely as their contribution to knowledge about our universe.
But theyare taking a longterm view, positioning their own companies to be part of the knowledge creation forthe project, and clearly identifying themselves as clever and competent operators in anever-expanding field.
It is doubtful that either of them have any clear ideaof where their involvement will lead.
However, their leadership andvision will in the near future be of immense benefit to our country. After all, what computerprogrammer wouldn't want to live in New Zealand to be part of both SKA and ongoing developments inmulticore and parallel programming.
Not that the government ormedia would have a clue.
It's not something that has a photoopportunity.
It also requires the ability tothink.
Of course nobody notices – there's no photo opportunity!
Of course nobody notices – there's no photo opportunity!
