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Does Pawsey also look after the South African SKA data? Seems a bit far for data transfer

_djo_ 3y ago
No, the South African array will have its own processing centres: https://www.sarao.ac.za/news/south-africa-will-host-one-of-the-fastest-supercomputers-in-the-world/ https://www.sarao.ac.za/news/south-africa-will-host-one-of-t... https://bandwidthblog.co.za/2023/05/16/supercomputer-south-africa-square-kilometre-array/ https://bandwidthblog.co.za/2023/05/16/supercomputer-south-a... https://www.skao.int/en/explore/big-data/361/science-processing-centres https://www.skao.int/en/explore/big-data/361/science-process...
- SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
  > One of the computers will be based in Cape Town. FYI, it makes sense for this location as it's still (relatively) close the the SKA telescopes, which are of course in a high, dry, remote and sparsely inhabited area. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sutherland,_South_Africa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sutherland,_South_Africa ) And Cape Town is the nearest large coastal population centre where several sub-sea internet cables connect to the land, so it's closer to the rest of the global network in that regard.
  - rantingdemon 3y ago
    A small correction :). SKA in South Africa is based closer to Carnavron than to Sutherland. https://www.skao.int/en/arrange-visit https://www.skao.int/en/arrange-visit Not that Sutherland is top be ignored, it does host the South African Astronomical Observatory. PS, it gets damn cold there in the desert, even during summer :). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_Astronomical_Observatory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_Astronomical_Obs...
defrost 3y ago
History wise the SKA concept was put forward and pressed forward from Australia in the (contrary to wikipedia) 1980s. Then it got internationally political with grant money coming in and backing from China, Britain, etc. The story today is: The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is an intergovernmental international radio telescope project being built in Australia (low-frequency) and South Africa (mid-frequency). The combining infrastructure, the Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO), and headquarters, are located at the Jodrell Bank Observatory in the United Kingdom. The SKA cores are being built in the southern hemisphere, where the view of the Milky Way galaxy is the best and radio interference at its least. Conceived in the 1990s, and further developed and designed by the late-2010s, when completed sometime in the 2020s it will have a total collecting area of approximately one square kilometre. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_Kilometre_Array https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_Kilometre_Array https://www.skao.int/en https://www.skao.int/en https://pawsey.org.au/projects/australian-square-kilometre-array-pathfinder-askap/ https://pawsey.org.au/projects/australian-square-kilometre-a... Pawsey has been up and running for some time now, well in advance of the actual physical SKA element build - modelling and computing for other Murchison radio quiet zone projects (cosmic microwave background, etc.) It's now getting up and running and more and more fully international - but over the past two decades the bulk of SKA material online has come from Australia, the CSIRO and Pawsey. It won't be the only local supercomputing centre anymore, with others in S.Africa and elsewhere, but it was the leader for PoC and illustrates the kinds of compute systems that will lie behind the project.
- _djo_ 3y ago
  > History wise the SKA concept was put forward and pressed forward from Australia in the (contrary to wikipedia) 1980s. It's not that simple. As one of The Australian CSIRO's own researchers points out, the basic concept of the SKA was independently developed by a number of researchers and institutions including the Project Cyclops proposal by Barney Oliver and John Billingham in 1971. [0] > Then it got internationally political with grant money coming in and backing from China, Britain, etc. It was international from the start, the result of merging a number of different international ideas and proposals. > Pawsey has been up and running for some time now, well in advance of the actual physical SKA element build - modelling and computing for other Murchison radio quiet zone projects (cosmic microwave background, etc.) > It's now getting up and running and more and more fully international - but over the past two decades the bulk of SKA material online has come from Australia, the CSIRO and Pawsey. > It won't be the only local supercomputing centre anymore, with others in S.Africa and elsewhere, but it was the leader for PoC and illustrates the kinds of compute systems that will lie behind the project. While Pawsey is an interesting and remarkable centre in its own right, and will be an important element of SKA and other radio astronomy, it is not the only processing centre for SKA and it's too Australia-centric to mention only it each time this question is raised. For instance, the South African array has also been operating for some time, beginning with the KAT-7 and MeerKAT precursor arrays, and South African companies have been at the forefront of developing new mid-frequency high-bandwidth FPGA-based signal processing solutions like ROACH-1, ROACH-2, and SKARAB both for them and the full SKA-Mid array. [1][2][3] I have already shared information about the Cape Town Science Processing Centre in another comment, but it's worth noting that the different frequencies used means that the data rate requirements are much higher for the South African centre, at around 20 terabits per second versus the 8 terabits per second needed to get SKA-Low data to Pawsey. [4] SKA is amazing in many ways, not least because of how international it was from the very beginning [0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1212.3497.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1212.3497.pdf [1] https://mg.co.za/article/2015-12-03-ska-gives-high-tech-firms-a-boost/ https://mg.co.za/article/2015-12-03-ska-gives-high-tech-firm... [2] https://indico.ict.inaf.it/event/2367/contributions/14597/attachments/6796/13916/11%20-%20Jader%20Monari%20-%20Next%20steps%20in%20radio%20astronomy%20INAF%20technologies.pdf https://indico.ict.inaf.it/event/2367/contributions/14597/at... [3] https://www.sarao.ac.za/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/ska_sa_tech_news_01.pdf https://www.sarao.ac.za/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/ska_sa_te... [4] https://www.skao.int/en/explore/big-data https://www.skao.int/en/explore/big-data

No, the South African array will have its own processing centres: https://www.sarao.ac.za/news/south-africa-will-host-one-of-the-fastest-supercomputers-in-the-world/ https://www.sarao.ac.za/news/south-africa-will-host-one-of-t... https://bandwidthblog.co.za/2023/05/16/supercomputer-south-africa-square-kilometre-array/ https://bandwidthblog.co.za/2023/05/16/supercomputer-south-a... https://www.skao.int/en/explore/big-data/361/science-processing-centres https://www.skao.int/en/explore/big-data/361/science-process...

SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
> One of the computers will be based in Cape Town. FYI, it makes sense for this location as it's still (relatively) close the the SKA telescopes, which are of course in a high, dry, remote and sparsely inhabited area. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sutherland,_South_Africa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sutherland,_South_Africa ) And Cape Town is the nearest large coastal population centre where several sub-sea internet cables connect to the land, so it's closer to the rest of the global network in that regard.
- rantingdemon 3y ago
  A small correction :). SKA in South Africa is based closer to Carnavron than to Sutherland. https://www.skao.int/en/arrange-visit https://www.skao.int/en/arrange-visit Not that Sutherland is top be ignored, it does host the South African Astronomical Observatory. PS, it gets damn cold there in the desert, even during summer :). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_Astronomical_Observatory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_Astronomical_Obs...

defrost 3y ago

History wise the SKA concept was put forward and pressed forward from Australia in the (contrary to wikipedia) 1980s. Then it got internationally political with grant money coming in and backing from China, Britain, etc. The story today is: The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is an intergovernmental international radio telescope project being built in Australia (low-frequency) and South Africa (mid-frequency). The combining infrastructure, the Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO), and headquarters, are located at the Jodrell Bank Observatory in the United Kingdom. The SKA cores are being built in the southern hemisphere, where the view of the Milky Way galaxy is the best and radio interference at its least. Conceived in the 1990s, and further developed and designed by the late-2010s, when completed sometime in the 2020s it will have a total collecting area of approximately one square kilometre. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_Kilometre_Array https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_Kilometre_Array https://www.skao.int/en https://www.skao.int/en https://pawsey.org.au/projects/australian-square-kilometre-array-pathfinder-askap/ https://pawsey.org.au/projects/australian-square-kilometre-a... Pawsey has been up and running for some time now, well in advance of the actual physical SKA element build - modelling and computing for other Murchison radio quiet zone projects (cosmic microwave background, etc.) It's now getting up and running and more and more fully international - but over the past two decades the bulk of SKA material online has come from Australia, the CSIRO and Pawsey. It won't be the only local supercomputing centre anymore, with others in S.Africa and elsewhere, but it was the leader for PoC and illustrates the kinds of compute systems that will lie behind the project.

_djo_ 3y ago
> History wise the SKA concept was put forward and pressed forward from Australia in the (contrary to wikipedia) 1980s. It's not that simple. As one of The Australian CSIRO's own researchers points out, the basic concept of the SKA was independently developed by a number of researchers and institutions including the Project Cyclops proposal by Barney Oliver and John Billingham in 1971. [0] > Then it got internationally political with grant money coming in and backing from China, Britain, etc. It was international from the start, the result of merging a number of different international ideas and proposals. > Pawsey has been up and running for some time now, well in advance of the actual physical SKA element build - modelling and computing for other Murchison radio quiet zone projects (cosmic microwave background, etc.) > It's now getting up and running and more and more fully international - but over the past two decades the bulk of SKA material online has come from Australia, the CSIRO and Pawsey. > It won't be the only local supercomputing centre anymore, with others in S.Africa and elsewhere, but it was the leader for PoC and illustrates the kinds of compute systems that will lie behind the project. While Pawsey is an interesting and remarkable centre in its own right, and will be an important element of SKA and other radio astronomy, it is not the only processing centre for SKA and it's too Australia-centric to mention only it each time this question is raised. For instance, the South African array has also been operating for some time, beginning with the KAT-7 and MeerKAT precursor arrays, and South African companies have been at the forefront of developing new mid-frequency high-bandwidth FPGA-based signal processing solutions like ROACH-1, ROACH-2, and SKARAB both for them and the full SKA-Mid array. [1][2][3] I have already shared information about the Cape Town Science Processing Centre in another comment, but it's worth noting that the different frequencies used means that the data rate requirements are much higher for the South African centre, at around 20 terabits per second versus the 8 terabits per second needed to get SKA-Low data to Pawsey. [4] SKA is amazing in many ways, not least because of how international it was from the very beginning [0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1212.3497.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1212.3497.pdf [1] https://mg.co.za/article/2015-12-03-ska-gives-high-tech-firms-a-boost/ https://mg.co.za/article/2015-12-03-ska-gives-high-tech-firm... [2] https://indico.ict.inaf.it/event/2367/contributions/14597/attachments/6796/13916/11%20-%20Jader%20Monari%20-%20Next%20steps%20in%20radio%20astronomy%20INAF%20technologies.pdf https://indico.ict.inaf.it/event/2367/contributions/14597/at... [3] https://www.sarao.ac.za/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/ska_sa_tech_news_01.pdf https://www.sarao.ac.za/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/ska_sa_te... [4] https://www.skao.int/en/explore/big-data https://www.skao.int/en/explore/big-data