The Largest Telescope Ever Built Will Rely On Citizens to Analyze Its Reams of Data

The Square Kilometer Array (artist's impression) That's a lot of space data. SKA Project Development Office and Swinburne Astronomy Productions via WikimediaThe Square Kilometer Array needs to borrow your hard drive
Australia wants to host the world's biggest and most sensitive radio telescope, and as part of its bid to land the $2.1 billion Square Kilometer Array (SKA) the joint Aussie-New Zealand effort is going go launch a massive cloud computing initiative in September to prove it can handle the data flow. The initiative could quickly turn into one of the largest scientific cloud computing networks in the world, tapping the computing power and storage offered up by desktop computers worldwide.
The Square Kilometer Array, as the name suggests, is going to be huge; 3,000 radio dishes will be spread as far as 2,000 miles in every direction from a central core, offering a full 1,000,000 square meters (that's one square kilometer) of collection surface. Such a sensitive instrument will probe the very beginnings of the universe, help test general relativity, and map the cosmos in unprecedented detail.
It will also produce reams upon reams of data, so much that it's estimated that the SKA could need data links with a capacity greater than that of the current Internet-- the whole Internet. Australia is already sinking $80 ...