LONGMONT, Colorado, May 21 -- Boulder Instruments announced that it has reached an agreement with MIT Haystack Observatory to develop the next generation of its StreamStor real-time storage system. The next generation product will meet aggressive requirements for high-speed digital recording and playback for Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) research at MIT.
    "MIT successfully demonstrated VLBI recording on our current StreamStor product in March of this year," said Ken Owens, co-founder and CEO of Boulder Instruments. "This project takes our technology to the next level by enabling recording and playback of digital data at rates exceeding 1-Gb per second to low cost IDE disk drives. This announcement affirms our leadership position in high-speed digital streaming."
    VLBI is a technique that combines the world's radio telescopes in order to gain many of the advantages of having a giant radio dish as large as the distance, or baseline, separating the telescopes. Radio telescopes in the US and around the world cooperate in these joint observations of quasars, galaxies and radio stars. VLBI was first demonstrated in the late 1960s. Each antenna operates independently, with the timing and frequencies controlled by highly accurate atomic clocks. The signals are currently recorded on magnetic tapes at data rates up to a billion bits per second. The tapes are then shipped to a central correlator for processing.