Square Kilometre Array: Workshop at JSC to Design the Science Data Processor

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is a radio telescope under development which will have a total collecting area of approximately one square kilometre. The pre-construction and design phase started in November 2013 and construction of the SKA receiving stations is scheduled to begin in early 2017 in Australia and South Africa. Initial observations are expected by 2019.

Analysing the data from a vast number of antennas will require significant HPC resources. The Science Data Processor (SDP) is an important component and Jülich Supercomputing Centre has been asked to support the design of the system hardware architecture, software, and algorithms. The SDP will have to provide several hundred petaflops of compute performance to process data arriving at rates of 1 TByte/s. Data processing will involve a set of complex pipelines which are still under development.

The workshop on 23 and 24 January 2014 at JSC brought together SKA experts from all over the world to define prototyping work on large-scale HPC systems thus successfully launching the project.
(Contact: Willi Homberg, w.homberg@fz-juelich.de)