The WIDAR Supercomputer

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The WIDAR Supercomputer

This is the supercomputer for the Very Large Array (VLA) in central New Mexico. Housed in its own Faraday cage-equipped room, this incredible instrument can perform 16 quadrillion operations every second. This computer was designed and built by our partners at the National Research Council in Canada. They came up with a new method of combining data, called Wideband Interferometric Digital ARchitecture, or WIDAR for short.

Credit: J. Stoke, NRAO/AUI/NSF

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