Engineering News

South Africa has joined an international computing collaboration to support the development of the international Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope. This was announced on Tuesday by SKA South Africa (SKA SA), a unit of the National Research Foundation and responsible for SKA-related activities in this country (including the precursor MeerKAT radio telescope array).

The collaboration was started last year by the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (which is better known as Astron) and US group IBM, as a public-private partnership. Designated Dome (after the cupola that often protects telescopes) it was planned to run for five years.

SKA SA has now joined Dome, which still has four years to run. “The Dome collaboration brings together a dream team of scientists and engineers in an exciting partnership of public and private institutions,” highlighted Dome South Africa technical coordinator Simon Ratcliffe.

The aim of Dome is to do research into very fast but low-power computer systems operating on the exascale. Such computers would have five times the computing capacity of today’s fastest supercomputers. An exascale computer would be able to do 10¹⁸ floating point operations per second (Flops) – or one quintillion flops. This scale of computing will be required to process the enormous amounts of data that will be produced by the SKA.

The SKA SA researchers will focus on three areas. The first is fundamental research into signal processing and advanced computer algorithms for the collection, processing and analysis of data. This is aimed at ensuring that clear images will be created from SKA data for scientists to study.

The second area is “desert-proofing” or “ruggedising” microservers being developed by the Dome project – these microservers are based on liquid-cooled three dimensional stacked chips. The third area will be the testing and development, using the 64-dish MeerKAT, of a software programme that will facilitate the optimal design of a holistic computing system for the complete, 3 000-dish, SKA.

“The Dome research has implications far beyond astronomy,” pointed out IBM Research Dome project leader Dr Ton Engbersen. “These scientific advances will help build the foundation for a new era of computing, providing technologies that learn and reason.”

“Dome is not only innovating in the laboratory, but our user-platform is setting a new standard in open collaboration,” affirmed Astron Dome project leader Dr Albert-Jan Boonstra. “In addition to SKA South Africa, four additional organisations are expected to join in the coming weeks including universities and small and medium-sized businesses located in the Netherlands.”