Half of a Supercomputer

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Half of a Supercomputer

Half of the VLA's original supercomputer

This is half of the original supercomputer used by the Very Large Array from 1979 until 2009. It used over 650 printed circuit cards with 85,000 integrated circuits, and it required 50,000 watts of power. It works as a correlator, performing 1.7 trillion operations a second to combine the waves received by 351 pairs of VLA antennas into a single set of data. The new correlator that replaced this one is 1000 times faster.

Credit: B. Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF

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