DOME project

DOME is a Dutch government-funded project between IBM and ASTRON in form of a public-private-partnership focussing on the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), the world's largest planned radio telescope. SKA will be built in Australia and South Africa. The DOME project objective is technology roadmap development that applies both to SKA and IBM. The 5-year project was started in 2012 and is co-funded by the Dutch government and IBM Research in Zürich, Switzerland.

The DOME project is focusing on three areas of computing, green computing, data and streaming and nano-photonics and partitioned into seven research projects.

The design of computers has changed dramatically in the last decades but the old paradigms still reign. Current designs stem from single computers working on small data sets in one location. SKA will face a completely different landscape, working on an extremely large data set, collected on myriad of geographically separated locations using ens of thousands of separate computers in real time. The fundamental principles for designing such a machine will have to be reexamined. Parameters concerning power envelope, accelerator technologies, workload distribution, memory size, CPU architecture, node intercommunications, must be investigated to draw new baseline to design from.

This fundamental research will work as the umbrella for the other six focus areas, help making proper decisions regarding architectural directions.

A first step will be a retrospective analysis of the design of the LOFAR and MeerKAT telescopes and development of a design tool to use when designing very large and distributed computers.

This project will focus on the very large amount of data the DOME must handle. SKA will generates petabytes of data daily and this must be handled differently according to urgency and geographical location whether its near the telescope arrays or in the datacenters. A complex tiered solution must be devised using a lot of technologies that currently is beyond the state-of-the-art. Driving forces behind the designs will be lowest possible cost, accessibility and energy efficiency.

This multi-tier approach will combine several different kinds of software technologies to analyze, sift, distribute, store and retrieve data on hardware ranging from traditional storage media like magnetic tape and hard drives to newly developed technologies like phase-change memory. The suitability of different storage media heavily depends on the usage patterns when writing and reading data, and these patterns will change over time, so there must also be room for changes to the designs.

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