Yesterday I blogged a little on the many things interesting ICT project running over here. One of them was the Lofar radio telescope, its heart being a giant supercomputer. Important parts of the project are the network and the computer, but not storage. The main thing the supercomputer will do is act as a giant DSP, in realtime it will filter information out of the gigantic amounts of data coming in.
James suggested C# being a good choice to implement the software. Would be interesting. The supercomputer to be used is an IBM-Blue gene, supplied by the IBM R&D department. It's an array of thousands of Power PC processesors running under ... Linux. Ok, let's install Mono. The nature of of the software, processing a continious stream, is also quite different from the request/response message oriented software most of us are using .net for. I havn't a doubt .net could do it, but I do not think they will do it that way.
Lofar's resulting information will be available to the public on the internet as well. I don't know yet in what format. Streaming video images of the sky (at day and night), webservices ? Stay tuned.
Peter