Cisco Collaborates with Murchison Widefield Array SKA Precursor to Demonstrate the Role of Commercia

SYDNEY, Australia – December 3, 2012 – Cisco announced that the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) project will use commercial-off-the-shelf technology from its next generation data centre portfolio in the building of this revolutionary new radio telescope in Western Australia.
The MWA is an international collaborative project to construct a low frequency radio telescope as a technology and science precursor to the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), a global mega-science project to build the world’s largest radio telescope. The MWA is led by Curtin University, as part of a consortium of 13 research and academic institutions across Australia, India, New Zealand and the United States.
Curtin University’s Professor Steven Tingay, who is director of the MWA, said that one of the major challenges for the SKA is how to best apply the expertise and technology capability within industry to address the SKA’s extremely high performance requirements.
“The work we are undertaking with Cisco for the MWA will demonstrate a very effective industry partnering model and deliver a highly capable and flexible correlator based on industry standard technology,” Professor Tingay said.
With Cisco’s strength and market leadership in data centre and 10 Gigabit Ethernet networking, the Cisco Unified Computing System™ (Cisco UCS®) and Cisco Nexus® Data Centre Series Switches will be part of the MWA correlator, responsible for aggregating and processing the massive volumes of raw radio signals for analysis by radio astronomy experts.  The high performance and scalability of the Cisco UCS will assist MWA researchers to gain insights into how best to handle “big data” to extract scientific insight and knowledge.
“With our long term involvement with the SKA project, Cisco is proud to be supporting the MWA. With the aim of demonstrating how an industry standards-based, commercial-off-the-shelf approach can support the ICT elements of the MWA, we are particularly excited to have the Cisco UCS data centre platform be adopted to support leading-edge research in Australia,” said Ken Boal, managing director of Cisco Enterprise and Public Sector.
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