How Mellanox connectivity aids research into black holes and asteroids

Colin Bridger, senior director for northern Europe at Mellanox, tells Computing Data Centre summit how his firm's technology supports the SKA radio telescope

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA), the radio telescope designed to provide the highest resolution images in all astronomy, uses Ethernet switches made from specially generated silicon by servers and storage providers Mellanox.

That's what Colin Bridger, senior director for northern Europe at Mellanox Technologies, told the audience at Hilton London Tower Bridge during the Computing Data Centre and Infrastructure Summit 2015.

Bridger described how Mellanox provides technology for the SKA project during his session titled ‘A focus on connectivity: enabling your data centre to do more with less', during which he described how the company differs from many in the sector by generating its own silicon for use in its solutions.

"What makes us different from other people out there is we generate all of our own silicon and all of that silicon goes into our own products," he explained, before going on to detail how Mellanox develops these tools in-house to ensure they're of the best quality.

"We test cables beyond what the specs require. That means we can guarantee end-to-end integrity and reliability which ultimately means less failures, fewer people going out to fix things and costing you less money because it's more efficient."

Aware that people might need convincing that Mellanox connectivity tools are indeed as good as he claimed, Bridger described how they're being used as part of the SKA radio telescope project.

"There's a small test case in the South African desert called the Square Kilometre Array project, which has radio telescopes pointing at the sky trying to figure out answers to all sorts of astrophysical experiments," he said.

"Essentially, what they have is 104 of our switches in a network out there in South Africa," Bridger said. "And these switches are all running at approximately 80 per cent capacity 24/7, bringing in data from black holes, asteroids, all sorts of things like that.

"They're streaming data at 80 per cent capacity 24/7 and they work isolated in the South African desert, there's not many test cases like this," Bridger said.

Mellanox isn't the only technology vendor involved with the world's largest telescope, which relies on a Dell-powered high-performance computing (HPC) cluster for data analysis.