Issue link: http://uwashington.uberflip.com/i/223926
Defining a New Sky Big data is transforming science, and building capacity to handle it is key I f you tried to describe the southern half of the observable universe in zeroes and ones, how much data would you pile up? UW Astronomy Professor Andrew Connolly and his colleagues plan to find out. They'll use the eight-meter Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) being built in Chile, with a 3.2 billion-pixel camera, to survey the sky. "Where you see one object with the naked eye, we'll see 10 million galaxies," Connolly said. "Within a year from the start of the survey, we'll have collected more information about the sky than in the entire history of astronomy." So much data will be collected, in fact, that the LSST project describes its goal as "defining a new sky." Helping researchers transfer, store, share and access the overwhelming immensity of that data is UW-IT's job. "Fundamentally, it comes down to plumbing," said Clare Donahue, UW-IT's Associate Vice President for Networks, Data Centers & Telecommunications. "You need big pipes. And you need them properly maintained, always available and secure. It's all part of the core infrastructure that UW-IT provides." To help prepare for this flood of data, UW's infrastructure is on the verge of a major upgrade, thanks in part to a grant from the National Science Foundation. By 2015 UW-IT plans to complete installation of a 40G "big pipe" to serve as the UW's data backbone. That's four times the capacity of UW's existing 10G network. 6 UW INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY