The Impact of SKA on Big Data Transmission

Advances in data generation and analysis are changing the ways we discover answers to our scientific and societal problems. We are experiencing an unprecedented era of hyper-growth driven by concurrent demand for mobile, video and cloud-based services and applications. For example, mobile data volumes are up 8000% from 2008 – 2011, while global cloud traffic is expected to grow to 4.3 zetabites by 2016 and U.S. Internet video consumption twelve-fold by 2020. The SKA central computer will have the processing power of about one hundred million PCs and will generate enough raw data to fill 15 million 64GB iPods every day. The stresses of this increased data growth, unpredictable traffic patterns, elastic compute/storage connectivity, and heightened end-user expectations for uninterrupted broadband service quality, make it impossible for traditional multi-layer (IP, Ethernet, Optical) transport architectures and conventional service deployment models to cope, let alone harness the opportunities that hyper-growth represents. My talk will closely examine how service providers around the world propose to cope with this big data challenge. To do so, we must fully recognize and support the growing importance of this new SKA generation of public-private partnerships in frontier science driving hi-tech innovation with emerging economies.