La informática en ESO a través del tiempo — El impresionante avance de la tecnología
ESO cumple cincuenta años, y para celebrar este importante aniversario, les mostramos retazos de nuestra historia. Una vez al mes, durante el año 2012, un especial “Ayer y hoy” de la Imagen de la Semana, mostrará cómo han cambiado las cosas a lo largo de las últimas décadas en los observatorios de La Silla y Paranal, en las oficinas de ESO en Santiago de Chile, y en la Sede Central en Garching (Munich, Alemania).
Nuestro par de fotografías de este mes muestran cómo el poder de la informática utilizado por ESO ha cambiado drásticamente con el paso del tiempo. Ambas imágenes muestran al astrónomo austriaco Rudi Albrecht frente a un sistema informático de ESO, pero en fechas separadas por décadas.
En la imagen histórica, tomada en 1974 en las oficinas de ESO en Santiago (Chile), podemos ver a Albrecht, lápiz en mano, estudiando códigos detenidamente frente a un teletipo. Trabajaba en el software para el instrumento “Spectrum Scanner”, instalado en el Telescopio de 1 metro de ESO [1], en el Observatorio de La Silla. Los datos eran procesados en Santiago utilizando el miniordenador Hewlett Packard 2116 que puede verse tras la impresora. Esta voluminosa computadora, con un procesador y una impresionante memoria de núcleo magnético de 16 kilobytes (!), almacenaba los resultados en una cinta magnética, datos que ya estaban preparados para su posterior procesado por parte de los astrónomos visitantes en las computadoras de sus respectivos centros de investigación. Para manejar archivos de una cinta que fueran mayores que la memoria disponible, Albrecht desarrolló un sistema de memoria virtual, aportándolo al Hewlett Packard Software Center.
La fotografía actual muestra a Albrecht en el Centro de Datos de la Sede Central de ESO en Garching (Munich, Alemania), que archiva y distribuye datos de los telescopios de ESO. Está frente a un estante o “rack” que contiene un sistema con cuarenta núcleos de procesamiento, 138 terabytes de capacidad de almacenamiento y 83 gigabytes de memoria RAM — ¡más de cinco millones de veces más que la máquina que utilizaba en 1974! Incluso el ordenador portátil o “tablet” que tiene entre las manos supera con creces a la vieja máquina y proporciona una moderna alternativa al lápiz y el papel.
A lo largo de los años, los sistemas informáticos de ESO se han desarrollado para manejar el flujo de datos científicos de los telescopios ubicados en los observatorios. Los avances en telescopios, detectores, y tecnología informática se traducen en que, ahora, los observatorios producen cantidades masivas de imágenes, espectros y catálogos. Por ejemplo, los dos telescopios de sondeo de Paranal, VST y VISTA, producen juntos más de 100 terabytes de datos por año. ¡A años luz de los días de las cintas magnéticas y las memorias de 16 kilobytes!
Notas
[1] El telescopio de 1 metro de ESO fue desmantelado en 1994.
Crédito
ESO
Sobre la Comparación de la Imagen
| Identificador: | potw1223a |
| Fecha de publicación: | 4 de Junio de 2012 a las 10:00 |
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