According to The Verge, Parsons is upgrading the HERA radio telescope in South Africa to 350 antennas, but found that graphics chips that handle all of these antenna data have doubled in price from $ 500 to $ 1,000 , So that the overall upgrade costs an additional 32,000 US dollars, the additional money is not paid to graduate students and researchers.
Virtual currency miners need graphics chips to solve the increasingly complex mathematical problems in order to create new cryptocurrencies, although this is a cybersecurity system, but also increase energy consumption and make the demand for graphics chips on the market in short supply.BBC has reported that cryptocurrencies The development of PC gamers and other scientists, such as those who are looking for extraterrestrial life researchers are detrimental.
Unable to get enough graphics chips, Parsons and other scientists had to build a smaller telescope, but the telescope was unable to detect faint radio signals. In 2014, Keith Vanderlinde, an astronomer at the University of Toronto, was building a prototype version of the radio telescope, the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Image Experiment (CHIME) also encountered the rise of bitcoin craze, drawing chips in short supply, the price soared.
The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Imaging Experiment Telescope can detect radio waves, plotting the universe and finding ways to expand the universe. The Hydrogen Intensity Imaging Experiment Telescope has 1,024 antennas that generate terabytes of data per second that must be clocked real-time Processing, computing power that requires several giga-floating-point operations.
Scientists said that to create radio telescopes easily millions, so add thousands of dollars is not the problem, the real crux lies in the price of graphics chips become difficult to predict, and sometimes when the chip shortage, suppliers can not promise to provide A certain amount, there is no price guarantee, resulting in logistics supply nightmare.
The report pointed out that although the telescope can use other customized products instead of graphics chips, but scientists choose to use graphics chips because of the affordable, and relatively easy to use.
For scientists, the only way to achieve this at a reasonable budget is to use consumer technology, which will make radio astronomy more difficult if the graphics chip is out of reach. Vanderlinde believes that the graphics chip is a key component and that if there is no drawing Chip, basically can not use radio telescope engaged in the universe to explore related research.