Data Processing and Storage for Black Hole Event Horizon Imaging

Supermicro Systems Help Capture the First Ever Images of a Black Hole

Executive Summary

The first imaging of the event horizon for a black hole involved an international partnership of 8 radio telescopes with major data processing at MIT and the Max Planck Institute (MPI) in Germany. The contribution of the brilliant scientists was aided by the expanded computing power of today’s IT infrastructure. Processing of the 4 petabytes (PB) of data generated in the project in 2017 for the original imaging utilized servers and storage systems, with many of these servers coming from Supermicro.