Scrub land in either South Africa or Australia will host the biggest telescope ever, the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), designed to listen to the oldest birth pangs of the universe. And the brains of the operation will likely be the world’s most powerful supercomputer.

The next generation of major scientific instruments will require a whole new information architecture, both for processing and data transfer and for storage. So the future of astronomy is closely tied to the future of computing. To interlace these futures even more tightly, IBM today announced a new $43 million (€32 million) center connected to its research base in Zurich, where computer scientists hope to design and build the first low-power exascale computer systems.