Look closely at the logo to the right on the box below. What could it possibly mean? Why is a scarab beetle trying to roll the earth? And what was that weird 'equation' in the title of this post?
Here's the secret of how they are related: Radio astronomy.
Huh?
It's all in the acronyms. KAT is not an animal, it is the Karoo Array Telescope, a state-of-the-art radio astronomy instrument consisting of an array seven dishes/receivers. In its more recently expanded form, a 64 dish array is being constructed and dubbed MeerKAT (which is the South African way of saying 'more' KAT). MeerKAT will become part of a worldwide radio telescope called SKA (Square Kilometer Array), the biggest and most powerful ever created.
The dishes of SKA will produce the equivalent of 10 times global internet traffic every day, and processing the data would require 100 million PCs. Clearly another approach is needed. Rather than use traditional CPUs, or general purpose graphics processing units (GPGPU), the SKA community uses computers built around field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA).
Cue the Reconfigurable Open Architecture Computing Hardware (ROACH); the first answer to this SKA computing challenge developed by the Collaboration for Astronomy Signal Processing and Electronics Research (CASPER) based at UC Berkeley Space Sciences Lab. There's also the Virtex 6 based ROACH2, which has now been eclipsed by a Virtex 7 ROACH3, a.k.a. SKARAB FPGA supercomputer.
So that leaves the beetle, a scarab beetle that is...which is nicely represented in the name of the product and as a symbol of the massive work pushing earth's worth of data, day after day after day after...any way you get it.
