Powerful Supercomputer Makes ALMA A Telescope

One of the most powerful calculating machines known to the civilian world has been installed and tested in a remote, high-altitude site in the Andes Mountains of northern Chile, marking one of the major remaining milestones toward completion of the most elaborate ground-based telescope in history, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA).

The ALMA correlator’s 134 million processors will continually combine and compare faint celestial “signals” received by as many as 50 dish-shaped antennas in the main ALMA array, enabling the antennas to work together as a single, enormous astronomical telescope. The correlator can additionally accommodate up to 14 of the 16 antennas in the Atacama Compact Array (ACA), a separate part of ALMA provided by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), for a total of 64 antennas. In radio telescope arrays, sensitivity and image quality increase with the number of antennas.

Full Story:http://www.nrao.edu/pr/2012/almacorrelator/