Sometime in the next decade, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) will open its com- pound eyes - roughly 2,000 radio dishes divided between sites in South Africa and Australia. The radio telescope will then begin staring into supermassive black holes, searching for the origin of cosmic magnetic fields and seeking clues about the young Universe. Meanwhile, the telescope's engineers are struggling to plan for the imminent data deluge. The photons that will stream into the array's receivers are expected to produce up to 1 exabyte (10~(18) bytes) of data per day, roughly the amount handled the entire Internet in 2000. Electricity costs for an on-site computing cluster big enough to process those data could total millions of dollars each year. So the engineers are investigating an increasingly common choice for researchers wrestling with big data: to outsource their computing to the cloud.
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