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BlackHoles1

Scientists at the Upshot Horizon Telescope have announced that they'll utilise helium-filled hard drives from Western Digital's HGST division in lieu of conventional hardware. At first glance, this might sound similar a marketing stunt — HGST obviously wants high-profile wins for its hermetically-sealed, helium-filled hard drives, and a new research project that combines telescope information from 10 different geographic locations into a single functional observatory might sound similar simply the ticket. Most of these observatories are built on mountains to accept advantage of high-altitude visibility, and it turns out that high altitude observatories run into unique data storage problems.

When the Large Millimeter Telescope began recording information on an assortment of 32 traditional hard drives, Computerworld reports, 28 of them failed. "We couldn't use them because the air pressure level was so depression that the drive heads kept crashing on the difficult drive platters," the project head, Shep Doeleman, told the site. "Using sealed helium drives was the only mode to ensure that data could exist captured in remote locations, such as our high-altitude observatory in United mexican states, where all other storage devices physically failed. Additionally, the high capacity of each drive ensured that nosotros were able to build denser and fewer enclosures overall."

MillimeterTelescope

Safety advisories and other warnings echo Doeleman's words. Dell doesn't certify its difficult drives to operate above 10,000 anxiety (at 15,200 feet, the Big Millimeter Telescope is well above this signal). The bulldoze heads are designed to float on a cushion of air, but when the air density begins to driblet, the pressure level within the bulldoze isn't sufficient to maintain the prophylactic absorber. Multiple articles online discuss the need to hermetically seal any drive that's going to operate at significant altitude, especially in war machine applications. Obviously the researchers had persevered with using 4TB standard drives, despite the loftier failure rates, but HGST offers an selection to increase density to 8TB, cut failure rates dramatically, and cut the cost of assembling the final data ready.

Why not use SSDs?

The obvious question would exist why the Result Horizon Telescope don't use SSDs, which wouldn't suffer distance problems at all. The most likely respond is because of the sheer amount of data the telescopes collect — each of the telescopes that participates in the project collects over 900TB of data. While the price of consumer SSDs has dropped precipitously in contempo years, enterprise SSDs are still quite expensive — and 900TB worth of enterprise solid-state storage is going to brand any administrator blanch. HGST's drives undoubtedly come at a premium, but Doeleman reports that the price/performance curve is however better than the electric current alternatives.

Once the information is gathered at each individual location, the entire ready of drives is physically shipped to the MIT Haystack Observatory, where a network of ~800 CPUs crunches the data through what Doeleman refers to as a "silicon lens." By using advanced algorithms and specialized processing techniques, scientists are able to analyze the event horizon of the supermassive blackness hole at the heart of our own galaxy — Sagittarius A*.

The goal of the EHT scientists is to measure and observe the immediate environment around the supermassive blackness hole to decide its characteristics and nature. Information technology's fitting that helium, which is relatively abundant in space only relatively scarce on Earth, helps us explore the nature of deep infinite and the vast structures at the center of our own galaxy.