Leading scientists and engineers from five of Europe’s largest experiments were in Malta last week to attend a conference discussing the problem of how to manage and use the enormous amounts of data that will be generated by large experiments such as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). The conference was hosted by the University’s Institute of Space Sciences and Astronomy (Issa).

The SKA project, which is currently being built in South Africa and Australia, will consist of thousands of radio telescopes all working in tandem to peer back in time in an effort to solve puzzles such as how the universe was created.

The radio telescopes will generate over 100 times the current global internet traffic. These enormous amounts of data will need to be untangled into an understandable format if new phenomena are to be discovered.

The conference sought to standardise the way such data can be managed and processed. The participants discussed future signal processing trends and common frameworks needed to unleash the huge potential of the SKA and other experiments such as the Large Hadron Collider, the European Spallation Source, the European Extremely Large Telescope and the European X-ray Free Electron Laser.

Representatives from several global companies, including world-leading processor manufacturers Altera and Xilinx, and global networking leader Mellanox also attended to discuss how industry and academics could collaborate in this regard.

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