Bell Labs computer scientist to preview telescope’s data flood

Rob Pike, a computer scientist at Bell Laboratories, will present a free public lecture about how best to manage and analyze the massive data flow from a proposed new telescope beginning at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, April 4, in room 120 of the Kent Chemical Laboratory, 1020 E.58th St., on the University of Chicago campus.

Pike is a frequent guest on "Late Night With David letterman." Pike will focus his April 4 talk on the Large-Aperture Synoptic Survey Telescope, an instrument that will address a variety of scientific problems, ranging from identifying asteroids that might hit the Earth to discovering thousands of exploding stars. The telescope is expected to generate a petabyte of data annually for 10 years. A petabyte is a quadrillion bytes, significantly more than the world’s most powerful supercomputers can currently store and process.

Pike began working at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., in 1980. He is the co-author of two books, The Unix Programming Environment and The Practice of Programming, and the designer of a gamma-ray telescope.

For more information, call the University of Chicago Department of Computer Science at (773) 702-6614.