SKA Regional Centre Coordination Group participation

SKA Regional Centre Coordination Group participation

Technological Developments

SKA Regional Centre Coordination Group participation

The SKA Board has endorsed the concept of SKA Regional Centres (SRCs) as its preferred model for meeting and managing the challenges posed by the extremely high data rates, data volumes and data analysis requirements of SKA Phase 1.  In this model, the SKA data products, produced in the SKA Science Data Processor in South Africa and Australia, will be delivered to a network of data and computing centres, which will be in charge of providing:

  • access to the SKA data products,
  • computational resources for processing, including science analysis and data visualisation
  • a platform for the development of software and data analysis tools,
  • a long-term science archive for SKA data products
  • local user support to their communities

Therefore, in September 2016 the SKA Office set up an SKA Regional Centre Coordination Group to take forward the concept of regional provision of critical functions, with the following members:

SKAO:

  • Antonio Chrysostomou (Chair; Head of Science Operations Planning)
  • Rosie Bolton (SRC Project Scientist)
  • Nick Rees (Head of SKA Computing and Sotware)
  • Miles Deegan (SDP Engineering Project Manager)

Members:

  • Séverin Gaudet (CADC/NRC, Canada)
  • Jeremy Main (SKA-SA, South Africa)
  • Peter Quinn (ICRAR, Australia)
  • Yogesh Wadadekar (NCRA, India)
  • Michael Wise (ASTRON, The Netherlands)
  • Shenghua Yu (BAO, China)

External :

  • Ian Bird (CERN, Switzerland)
  • Andy Connolly (LSST/U Washington, USA)
  • Lourdes Verdes-Montenegro (IAA-CSIC, Spain) (Invited in December 2016)

In December 2016, the chair of this committee invited Lourdes Verdes-Montenegro as one of its external members, given her expertise in eScience and the activities carried out by her group, AMIGA, supporting astronomers to cope with the large volumes of data and computational complexity associated to their analysis while doing reproducible science.

 

Based on this expertise, ideas like reproducible science or the use of Science Gateways technologies have been suggested to provide a single and federated point access to the SKA data products distributed in the SRC network as well as to the tools and the needed processing power. Complementary to this work is the one developed as part of SKA-Link project, aiming at defining a technical strategy (a set of best practices) to be considered in the design of the SKA Regional Centres to contribute to make of SKA a reference not only in science and technology, but in the scientific methodology too. More about this work in the SKA-Link project web page.