An artist’s impression of part of the SKA-Mid array in South Africa
Photo by: SKA Organisation
The South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (Sarao) announced on Thursday that the international consortium of computing specialists, which included South Africans, which had been developing the Science Data Processor (SDP) for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope project, had completed its engineering design work on the system. The consortium, led by the UK’s University of Cambridge, involved almost 40 institutions in 11 countries.
The SDP project involved the design of the computing hardware, software and algorithms required to take the enormous amounts of data that will be provided by the SKA and process it into science data products – astronomical images, in other words. The SDP would be composed of two supercomputers, one in South Africa and one in Australia.
The South African institutions involved were Sarao itself, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research’s Centre for High-Performance Computing, the University of Cape Town, and local companies Space Advisory Company (SAC) and Eclipse Holdings. Awarded funding under Sarao’s Financial Assistance Programme (FAP), SAC and Eclipse seconded a total of four engineers to the SDP consortium.
Individual South African researchers involved included Sarao technical lead for scientific computing, Simon Ratcliffe, chosen as the SDP consortium system engineer back in 2012, and Sarao system engineer Shagita Gounden, who worked full-time for the SDP consortium on the system’s control and monitoring element. Also cited by Sarao for his outstanding contribution to the project was SAC data processing system engineer Ferdl Graser, who was selected as SDP consortium system engineer in 2014.
“The unique requirements for the SDP have also driven our specialists to be creative and design unique technologies that allow Sarao to contribute to the economic development and commercialisation in South Africa,” highlighted Sarao MD Dr Rob Adam. Sarao and South African specialists will continue to be involved in the further development of the SDP, leading to its construction. Because the FAP has been extended, five local industry engineers will be working with three Sarao engineers as part of the international team undertaking the next phase of the project.
South Africa and Australia will co-host the core elements of the SKA telescope. South Africa will have the mid-frequency element of the SKA (known as SKA-Mid for short) and Australia will have the low-frequency element (SKA-Low). The two SDP supercomputers will be located in Cape Town and Perth.