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> 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 Aus

by _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

defrost 3y ago
Sure, there was a different big antenna idea of a different size and a different end goal sketched out in the early 1970s. This antenna project, with a square kilometre target and Lo|Mid frequency ranges was sketched out largely by European and Commonwealth astros at Commonwealth Radio conferences - your link does mention the earlier work by Canadians and parallel|later work by the Dutch to craft small dish arrays to survey the sky (as opposed to the Cyclops SETI goals). The event that really kicked things along (as I distantly recall) from an idea on the back of envelopes to a project with dot points looking for international backers was the 1988 collapse of the 300 Foot Telescope - whether it was due to load, to vibrations, poor materials, etc. it served to launch several new lines of creating larger telescopes - suspended across natural craters, broken into arrays of smaller dishes, etc. SKA as a specific project had some back history before it "officially" was launched; before the 2011 legal entity, before the 1998 name adoption, before the 1990 anniversary of VLA's. My comment was motivated largely by looking back in wonder at just how long it takes to get projects of this scale up and running - I've attended pie in the sky proposals for variations on this since 1982 (same year as my first introduction to the (then) current state of gravity wave detection). > While Pawsey .. it is not the only processing centre for SKA I can't see that I made that claim, I did link to Pawsey as an example of other systems that lie behind SKA and another comment linked to the parallel systems being launched in S.Africa.

by _djo_ 3y ago

defrost 3y ago

Sure, there was a different big antenna idea of a different size and a different end goal sketched out in the early 1970s. This antenna project, with a square kilometre target and Lo|Mid frequency ranges was sketched out largely by European and Commonwealth astros at Commonwealth Radio conferences - your link does mention the earlier work by Canadians and parallel|later work by the Dutch to craft small dish arrays to survey the sky (as opposed to the Cyclops SETI goals). The event that really kicked things along (as I distantly recall) from an idea on the back of envelopes to a project with dot points looking for international backers was the 1988 collapse of the 300 Foot Telescope - whether it was due to load, to vibrations, poor materials, etc. it served to launch several new lines of creating larger telescopes - suspended across natural craters, broken into arrays of smaller dishes, etc. SKA as a specific project had some back history before it "officially" was launched; before the 2011 legal entity, before the 1998 name adoption, before the 1990 anniversary of VLA's. My comment was motivated largely by looking back in wonder at just how long it takes to get projects of this scale up and running - I've attended pie in the sky proposals for variations on this since 1982 (same year as my first introduction to the (then) current state of gravity wave detection). > While Pawsey .. it is not the only processing centre for SKA I can't see that I made that claim, I did link to Pawsey as an example of other systems that lie behind SKA and another comment linked to the parallel systems being launched in S.Africa.