N1005 IBM Research: SKA

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdd6Vl57YPO2k4VirhOoGrsMX89tzxpJ5Dp8IFNNtdDTiaD3e2shqtXCvTLsp0T_QfWuE2JOtTWlkyaIS0yFUdm2DCLDtzbjIdi_fR0vKv9DU6N3_EWQp_1ZHXwPy9xMaGNNQYBsnww-s/s1600/IMG_1826+%25281%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdd6Vl57YPO2k4VirhOoGrsMX89tzxpJ5Dp8IFNNtdDTiaD3e2shqtXCvTLsp0T_QfWuE2JOtTWlkyaIS0yFUdm2DCLDtzbjIdi_fR0vKv9DU6N3_EWQp_1ZHXwPy9xMaGNNQYBsnww-s/s320/IMG_1826+%25281%2529.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><div style="color: #0433ff; line-height: normal;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Name: <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthieusimeoni">Matthieu Simeoni</a></span></span></div><div style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Location: IBM Research - Zurich</span></div><div style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Nationality: French</span></div><div style="line-height: normal;"></div><div style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Focus: Big Data Analytics</span></div><div><br /></div><div style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">In 2012, IBM and ASTRON, The Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, embarked on an ambitious project they named <a href="http://www.zurich.ibm.com/news/12/dome.html">DOME</a> to research extremely fast, but low-power exascale computer systems targeted for the international Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescope.</span><br /><a name="more"></a></div><div style="line-height: normal; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"></span></div><div style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Due to the petabytes of data collected by the SKA from deep space the DOME scientists are investigating emerging technologies including photonics, phase change memory, and streaming analytics that will be required to read, store and analyze all the raw data that will be collected daily. Linking everything are the algorithms themselves, and what works in one instance does not necessarily scale. Thus one team takes on the challenge of fundamentally changing the data acquisition and processing, making the data less astronomic (in quantity) as it were, with already quite some success.</span></div><div style="line-height: normal; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">One of the scientists on this team is Matthieu Simeoni who recently was recognized with the IBM Research Prize in Computational Science for his master thesis, undertaken at EPFL.  This prize promotes research in computational sciences and recognizes outstanding projects focused on advanced modelling and simulation methods or their applications to important topics in diverse areas of science (physics, chemistry, and biology) and engineering.</span></div><div style="line-height: normal; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">I recently spoke with him about his research.</span></div><div style="line-height: normal; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="line-height: normal;"><b><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Congratulations on your award. Can you tell me what it recognizes?</span></b></div><div style="line-height: normal; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b></b><br /></span></div><div style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Matthieu Simeoni (MS): </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i>The DOME project is made up of several work packages including "Novel Algorithms", which is focused on developing efficient algorithms for the processing of the astronomical amount of data produced by modern radio interferometers. This data, not including the noise, is coming from the original Big Bang from 13 billion years ago and in it lies the answers to fundamental questions about our universe.</i></span></div><div style="line-height: normal; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i><br /></i></span></div><div style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i>In my master thesis, we proposed a new imaging pipeline, with higher accuracy and up to 30 times faster than the current imaging pipeline — this is what the award recognized. The imaging pipeline was tested in realistic scenarios, using simulated data from the LOFAR telescope, an SKA pathfinder.</i></span></div><div style="line-height: normal; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i><br /></i></span></div><div style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i>As a side note, I didn’t even know I was winning the award until I was called on stage. It was a complete surprise.</i></span></div><div style="line-height: normal; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="line-height: normal;"><b><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">What was the biggest challenge?</span></b></div><div style="line-height: normal; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b></b><br /></span></div><div style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">MS: <i>We started with a clean slate, threw away conventional thinking and targeted what some perceived as radical ideas, but that was the easy part. </i></span></div><div style="line-height: normal; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i><br /></i></span></div><div style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i>Astronomers, like most scientists, don’t take change easily and they have been using their current algorithms for decades. So the biggest challenge will be to get them to use our techniques which is why we are building up enough evidence to position it as too good to pass up. And the beauty behind our algorithm is that it scales very nicely. We’ve already had very good success in scaling it over the past four months.</i></span></div><div style="line-height: normal; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="line-height: normal;"><b><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">How did you find out about the DOME project?</span></b></div><div style="line-height: normal; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b></b><br /></span></div><div style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">MS: <i>It’s actually a funny story. Two years ago I, along with three of my classmates from EPFL, <a href="http://actu.epfl.ch/news/mathumanitarian-games/">organized a solidarity trip</a> to South Africa. The goal was to go and meet children from impoverished communities to teach them mathematics using games and activities, in the hope that maybe we could inspire them for the future. You can watch a video of our trip <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gF7E0XYa9Ck">here</a><span style="line-height: normal;">.</span></i></span></div><div style="line-height: normal; min-height: 15px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i><br /></i></span></div><div style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i>During one of our days off, 24 EPFL students took a ride to the Meerkat telescope construction site, in the desolated but incredibly beautiful region of the Northern Cape, at more than 650 km from the city of Cape Town. I was completely fascinated with the technology.</i></span></div><div style="line-height: normal; min-height: 14px;"><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></i></div><div style="line-height: normal; min-height: 14px;"><i><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">A few months after this life-changing experience, I met IBM scientist <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pub/matteo-cossale/60/545/32">Matteo Cossale</a>, who is working on the microservers for the DOME project and he told me about IBM’s involvement. I applied right away and spoke with IBM scientist <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pub/paul-hurley/1/420/716">Paul Hurley</a> who eventually found a position for me on the team. </span></i></div><div><br /></div>

Name: Matthieu Simeoni Location: IBM Research - Zurich Nationality: French Focus: Big Data Analytics In 2012, IBM and ASTRON, The Netherland...

<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-4HUVguIgG58WkboUW9O9nsDXOOg7OQLcygpQbAHZN8eKGoH0zo_yBUShsoH2bAJ1Cg1-GgLroP_Orrx-Gr7XVy3vkIgoFxJeaxAiXUcImPr7mrWQKrzymx4MzLk2xBjtl5oZL8W801A/s1600/14426242840_2439eae28a_q.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-4HUVguIgG58WkboUW9O9nsDXOOg7OQLcygpQbAHZN8eKGoH0zo_yBUShsoH2bAJ1Cg1-GgLroP_Orrx-Gr7XVy3vkIgoFxJeaxAiXUcImPr7mrWQKrzymx4MzLk2xBjtl5oZL8W801A/s1600/14426242840_2439eae28a_q.jpg" /></a></div><span style="font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPSMT'; font-size: large;">IBM scientist <a href="http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view.php?person=zurich-lui">Ronald Luijten</a> has many hobbies, from <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-A-dlZKX3nU&edit=vd">gliding over the Swiss alps at 4,000 meters</a>, to taking photos with his <a href="https://flic.kr/p/9fwvKX">quadrocopter</a>, or tinkering with technology -- particularly microservers, which he refers to as "data centers in a box."<br /><br />By day, Ronald is working on a <a href="http://www.enterprisetech.com/2014/07/07/ibm-dome-microserver-appeal-enterprises/">64-bit microserver </a>for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), an international consortium to build the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope. He hopes that someday petabytes of Big Data from the Big Bang (13 billion years ago) will be crunched on the microserver, and uncover fundamental questions about the universe, including are we alone? <br /><br />By night and on the weekends, Ronald has also built a microserver to host his website <a href="http://swissdutch.ch/">swissdutch.ch</a>. The passionate environmentalist spent this past weekend "unplugging" his microserver from the electricity grid and and now powers it from solar panels backed-up with batteries. <br /><br />"On September 27, 2014, I changed the energy source of the wandboard Quad to solar panels. I installed 40W of photo-voltaic panels feeding a lead acid battery of 18Ah (2x 9 Ah). The panels come in increments of 20W, and I did not think 20W was enough to make it through winter. Note that around this time of year (September), the sun is right between its minimum and maximum high point. So, I pointed the panels due south at an angle of 45 degrees," Ronald said. <br /><br />To keep track of Ronald's progress visit his <a href="http://swissdutch.ch/">blog</a> or follow him on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/ronaldgadget">@ronaldgadget </a></span><br /><div class="page" title="Page 1"><div class="section" style="background-color: rgb(100.000000%, 100.000000%, 100.000000%);"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><div class="page" title="Page 1"><div class="section" style="background-color: rgb(100.000000%, 100.000000%, 100.000000%);"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><div class="page" title="Page 1"><div class="section" style="background-color: rgb(100.000000%, 100.000000%, 100.000000%);"><div class="layoutArea"><span style="font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPSMT'; font-size: 12.000000pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghwxsFHKPG1C8boIvhXOJ95mE3-JzlUnFHVLXYMsAylVEanWAmpfyH111MvcK-pPA5OkFxrIPIhDWxFpznmBJ91eGLhw4bcfSo1nysUQR_kg6OrzcFBxWAhkCP4NEaiZuJFjUtHE1MBiA/s1600/40Wpanels.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghwxsFHKPG1C8boIvhXOJ95mE3-JzlUnFHVLXYMsAylVEanWAmpfyH111MvcK-pPA5OkFxrIPIhDWxFpznmBJ91eGLhw4bcfSo1nysUQR_kg6OrzcFBxWAhkCP4NEaiZuJFjUtHE1MBiA/s1600/40Wpanels.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQZbpdR__BAf-wMM2btJPi-JvFIxG7Sc9y0yaT-KcCFlIDsKx5kSBeSysb0nBOOuTIsTkxo7mWhyphenhyphennDnPVtHN1Q1Go2xd7dRAGkIEKVVtIEljnW7ro_G9hD3HE-SvI30F8zNriwP_6ZLlQ/s1600/MeasureControl.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="126" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQZbpdR__BAf-wMM2btJPi-JvFIxG7Sc9y0yaT-KcCFlIDsKx5kSBeSysb0nBOOuTIsTkxo7mWhyphenhyphennDnPVtHN1Q1Go2xd7dRAGkIEKVVtIEljnW7ro_G9hD3HE-SvI30F8zNriwP_6ZLlQ/s1600/MeasureControl.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_UM_zBZwTEBsgpK1Umiz2Qz47oNbsNGr4kmuYWfQyL3ctZd4bzrs7MTTJowniM5HNz6R5UkZBBfX63ubaPP0WgX_FYQXSIFoWI2pUgAGVbsODyNqOUXM1gFVnmzIpVzN9r0kAvdVpyN0/s1600/SolarTestSetup.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_UM_zBZwTEBsgpK1Umiz2Qz47oNbsNGr4kmuYWfQyL3ctZd4bzrs7MTTJowniM5HNz6R5UkZBBfX63ubaPP0WgX_FYQXSIFoWI2pUgAGVbsODyNqOUXM1gFVnmzIpVzN9r0kAvdVpyN0/s1600/SolarTestSetup.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div class="layoutArea"><span style="font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPSMT'; font-size: 12.000000pt;"><br /></span></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>

microprocessor SKA solar zurich Microserver powered by the sun

IBM scientist Ronald Luijten has many hobbies, from gliding over the Swiss alps at 4,000 meters , to taking photos with his quadrocopter , ...