SKA and Cern join forces over big data

The Square Kilometre Array project and Cern, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, have agreed to cooperate on “extreme-scale computing”.

The two initiatives signed an agreement on 14 July to tackle challenges in computing and data storage at the near-exascale level, with an exabyte being a billion billion bytes of information. Both are preparing to generate data files of this magnitude in the near future, and they have decided to cooperate on the development of a cloud-based network of data centres to help them handle their loads.

“The signature of this collaboration agreement between two of the largest producers of science data on the planet shows that we are really entering a new era of science worldwide”, Philip Diamond, director-general of the SKA, said in a statement.