From Cambridge to the Square Kilometre Array: Computers and Radio Astronomy

The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC) is home to the world's largest collection of working historic computers.Follow the development of computing: from the Turing-Welchman Bombe and Colossus of the 1940s through the large systems and mainframes of the 1950s, 60s and 70s, to the rise of personal computing and the rise of mobile computing and the internet.Recognised as one of England’s top 100 ‘irreplaceable places’, we welcome corporate and group visits, schools and individuals from all over the world.We are normally open Tuesday to Friday 10:30 -17:00, Saturday & Sunday 10:30 – 17:00. Please check tickets for actual opening days and times.TNMOC operates independently of Bletchley Park Trust, although we are located on the Bletchley Park Estate.To visit us, go through the main Bletchley Park entrance, through the barrier, walk or drive bearing left beyond the main car parks, to our separate entrance located at the top of the Park.Visit their website here for more information.https://www.tnmoc.org/Sat Nav users: please use the postcode for the railway station MK3 6DS on Sherwood Drive and then follow signs. The postcode for Bletchley Park will actually take you to an old entrance which is closed.

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From Cambridge to the Square Kilometre Array: The computers that grew-up with radio astronomy

A Virtual Talk by Verity AllanThe Square Kilometre Array (SKA) will be the world’s largest radio telescope - providing a clearer understanding than ever before of our universe, with a computing heritage rooted in Cambridge University and The National Museum of Computing.SKA will construct images of the Universe in greater detail than Hubble, with two 100+ Petaflop supercomputers processing torrents of data from hundreds of thousands of antennas in Australia and Africa.We’ve come a long way from the time when Nobel-prize winning scientists of the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory relied on their Cambridge University colleagues - just miles away at the Mathematical Laboratory - to crunch their data and build their computers. The Mathematical Laboratory was responsible for the historically important EDSAC, EDSAC II and TITAN - with work on an operational reconstruction of EDSAC currently under way at our Museum.Join Cambridge University PhD student and employee Verity Allan, whose helping code SKA, on September 15 as she takes you on a journey through the high-power computing used to study our universe - from the fields of Cambridge to the expanses of Africa and the outback.During her on-line talk, Verity will discuss:<ul><li>The demands that mega radio astronomy projects place on computing, with a peek inside SKA and also the Low Frequency Array that’s currently the world’s biggest radio telescope.</li><li>Workloads performed by the historically important EDSAC, EDSAC 2 and TITAN, the small - compared to today’s standards - computing power they supplied and the breakthroughs in our understanding of the universe they facilitated.</li><li>The stories of those who programmed these systems - especially the women, eclipsed by the Nobel-winning Martin Ryle, of the Mullard Radio Astronomy, and the man he turned to build TITAN to further his work - Maurice Wilkes, father of EDSAC.</li></ul>

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