From École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne: “EPFL joins the giant radio telescope SKA for the Swiss community”

From École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

4.20.20
Sarah Perrin

The Square Kilometre Array, or SKA, will be the biggest radio telescope ever built. Thanks to this ambitious tool, some of the universe’s greatest mysteries will be resolved. EPFL became a member of the SKA Organisation (SKAO) beginning of April 2020 and will coordinate the contributions to this project on behalf of the Swiss academic community.

Swiss Interest and Contribution Document

Swiss participation in SKA

EPFL joins the giant radio telescope

This is one of the biggest and most ambitious scientific tools of the XXIst century. The Square Kilometre Array, or SKA, is an impressive radio telescope project, which will build an array of 130 15m-diameter dish antennas in South Africa and an array of 130’000 TV-like antennas in Western Australia in the coming years. Thanks to it, some of the Universe’s greatest mysteries will be studied with a whole new level of precision. Along with thirteen countries officially involved, Switzerland is considering participating in this huge adventure. As an initial step, EPFL was just granted special member status of the SKA Organisation (SKAO) and will be the lead institution coordinating the contributions to the SKA on behalf of the Swiss academic community*.

Most telescopes we readily think of use optical light similar to what we see with our eyes. The SKA will capture light of celestial objects at radio waves, similar to the light used by our smartphones to communicate together. At radio waves, the sky is much different that the one we see in optical light.

“This new high-performance radio telescope will open a new view of the whole Universe”,commented Prof. Jean-Paul Kneib of EPFL leading the consortium of Swiss Scientists interested in the SKA project, “SKA will detect the formation of planetary system around distant stars, the cold Hydrogen gas around galaxies, the nuclei of distant galaxies harbouring an active super-massive blackholes”

“SKA will also measure the magnetic field in galaxies and at larger scales and map the fluctuation of the Hydrogen distribution in the first billion year of the beginning of the Universe” added Prof. Daniel Schaerer from University of Geneva, “SKA will allow us to address some key questions on our Universe, such as the nature of the Dark Matter and the Dark Energy, or explore the Cosmic Dawn the period of time when the first stars and first galaxies formed”.

“A huge challenge”

As outlined in the white paper Swiss Interests and Contribution to the SKA, published end of February 2020, Swiss scientific institutions* and high-tech industry partners are extensively involved in SKA-related science and technology, contributing in research and development in the fields of distributed radio frequency systems, high performance computing, machine learning and artificial intelligence.

“SKA is faced with a huge challenge, in signal processing” explained Prof. Jean-Philippe Thiran of EPFL, a specialist of image processing techniques, “the data flow that will come out of the many antennas will need to be combined efficiently and likely with new algorithms to extract the complete astrophysical information”.

World-class research in astronomy

“I am delighted to welcome EPFL to the SKA Organisation as our newest member,” said Chair of the SKA Board of Directors Dr Catherine Cesarsky. “This renowned research institution and its partners have brought valuable expertise to the SKA, and we look forward to working ever more closely with our Swiss colleagues as we enter this exciting phase of the project, completing the very last steps before construction.”

Switzerland has held observer status within the Organisation since 2016, with many Swiss research institutions* and industry partners contributing to various aspects of the SKA. The country has a history of world-class research and development in science and astronomy, including leading the recent CHEOPS mission to study exoplanets and developing instrumentation for the future European-Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) in Chile, among other things. And for five years now, the Swiss SKA Days bring together national and international representatives of academia, industry and government, showcasing the breadth of opportunities for Swiss institutions and companies to be involved in the SKA. The location rotates each year to reflect the various contributions of different Swiss institutions. It is due to be held at the University of Zurich later this year.

“SKA is a very ambitious infrastructure in astrophysics, and Switzerland has a lot to offer and benefit from it”, said Olivier Küttel, Head of International Affairs at EPFL. It is not just about physics, but also about the handling and analysis of large data sets, something Switzerland is good at. It remains the goal of EPFL that Switzerland should become a member of the SKA.”

First EPFL, then Switzerland!

EPFL is now a member of the SKAO, which has been responsible for overseeing the telescope design phase, until the process of transitioning into the SKA Observatory is completed. The Observatory is due to come into being in 2020. Switzerland’s Federal Council recently triggered the first political debate in Parliament regarding the possible participation of Switzerland as a member state in the future.

“As the dream of building SKA is about to become a reality, SERI welcomes and supports the EPFL decision to join the SKA Organisation as a special member”, stated Xavier Reymond, , Head of the International Research Organisations Unit at the State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation SERI, and in charge of the relationships between Switzerland and SKAO. “The accession of the EPFL will benefit to the Swiss scientific community as a whole and will open business perspectives to Swiss companies. Switzerland is the proud Seat of CERN and a dedicated Member of the European Southern Observatory and of the European Space Agency. Therefore, we all look forward to assessing the opportunity to complement with the SKA Observatory this portfolio of successful participations in disruptive intergovernmental endeavours dedicated to the fundamental understanding of the Universe.”

SKA Director-General Prof. Philip Diamond also welcomed EPFL to the SKAO, noting the importance of the country’s involvement so far. “Swiss institutions have been a vital part of the SKA’s design phase and bring with them a well-deserved reputation for excellence in science and astronomy, as well as being involved with some of today’s most exciting projects,” he said. “As we move ever closer to SKA construction, EPFL’s membership serves to highlight the broad range of expertise that the SKA can count upon in this next phase.”

*The Swiss Academic Community includes:
Universities of Geneva, Zurich, Bern, ETHZ, CSCS, FHNW, HES-SO, and Verkehrshaus Lucerne and EPFL.

See the full article here .

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EPFL campus

EPFL is Europe’s most cosmopolitan technical university. It receives students, professors and staff from over 120 nationalities. With both a Swiss and international calling, it is therefore guided by a constant wish to open up; its missions of teaching, research and partnership impact various circles: universities and engineering schools, developing and emerging countries, secondary schools and gymnasiums, industry and economy, political circles and the general public.

From insideHPC: “HPE to Build Supercomputer for MWA Telescope in Australia”

From insideHPC

February 29, 2020

HPE has been selected by the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre, Perth, AU to deliver a new $2 million compute cluster that will support one of the Square Kilometre Array precursor projects in Australia, the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) radio telescope.

SKA Square Kilometer Array

SKA Murchison Widefield Array, Boolardy station in outback Western Australia, at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO)

Pawsey Supercomputer Centre, Perth Australia

Magnus Cray XC40 supercomputer

Galaxy Cray XC30 Series Supercomputer

Fujisto Raijin supercomputer

Fujitsu Raijin Supercomputer

“The new 78-node cluster will provide a dedicated system for astronomers to process in excess of 30 PB – equal to 399 years of high definition video – of MWA telescope data using Pawsey infrastructure. The new cluster will provide users with enhanced GPU capabilities to power AI, computational work, machine learning workflows and data analytics.”

The MWA and another SKA precursor telescope – ASKAP – are located at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory in remote Western Australia, which is owned and operated by Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO.

Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) is a radio telescope array located at Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO) in the Australian Mid West. ASKAP consists of 36 identical parabolic antennas, each 12 metres in diameter, working together as a single instrument with a total collecting area of approximately 4,000 square metres.

Until now processing of data collected by both the MWA and ASKAP telescopes has been done on Galaxy, Pawsey’s real-time supercomputing system dedicated to radio astronomy.

However, the data processing needs of both instruments has been growing: MWA has doubled the number of antennas available, and ASKAP will soon be ready to undertake full surveys of the sky.

To meet this growing demand, the new MWA cluster has been procured ahead of the main supercomputing system, as part of a $70 million Pawsey capital refresh project funded by the Australian Government.

Mark Stickells, Pawsey Executive Director, said the upgrade will allow Pawsey to deliver a service that is tailored to the Australian scientific landscape, and to keep pace with global advances in supercomputing technology.

“Procurement of the new MWA cluster was the result of a thorough consultation process with key stakeholders and will provide the best system possible to respond to the specific needs of MWA telescope users,” he said. “The new MWA cluster at Pawsey will feature 156 of the latest generation of Intel CPUs and 78 cutting-edge GPUs more high-bandwidth memory, internal high-speed storage and more memory per node.”

About the importance of this process and its results, Professor Melanie Johnston-Hollitt, MWA Director, said “As the MWA Director, I am delighted to see the conclusion of the procurement process, it was an outstanding example of collaboration between Pawsey and MWA and I am glad we had the opportunity to provide input into Australia’s HPC future.”

“As a researcher, I am excited that this new infrastructure will give us the chance to accelerate our workflows, leading to faster scientific discoveries and for providing the opportunity to continue to use the MWA as a scientific, technical, and operational testbed for the future Square Kilometre Array,” she concluded.

The Pawsey Supercomputing Centre’s 546 TeraFlops MWA cluster will comprise 78 nodes, each with two Intel Xeon Gold 6230 processors operating at 2.1 GHz and providing forty compute cores in total, a single NVIDIA V100 with 32 GB of high-bandwidth memory, 960 GB of local NVMe storage and 384 GB of main memory.

HPE was chosen not only because they successfully meet MWA’s technical requirements, but also their ability to leverage resources around the world to provide the highest level of support for the lifetime of the system in addition to their local support.

They provided the most space-efficient solution, only requiring two racks, which saves on floor space as well as power and cooling connections.

Commissioning of the new MWA cluster system is expected to be finalized by Q2 2020.

The Pawsey Supercomputing Centre is an unincorporated joint venture of CSIRO – Australia’s national science agency, Curtin University, Edith Cowan University, Murdoch University and the University of Western Australia. The procurement of this system was conducted by CSIRO as the centre agent for Pawsey.

See the full article here .

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Founded on December 28, 2006, insideHPC is a blog that distills news and events in the world of HPC and presents them in bite-sized nuggets of helpfulness as a resource for supercomputing professionals. As one reader said, we’re sifting through all the news so you don’t have to!

If you would like to contact me with suggestions, comments, corrections, errors or new company announcements, please send me an email at rich@insidehpc.com. Or you can send me mail at:

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From Oak Ridge National Laboratory: “With ADIOS, Summit processes celestial data at scale of massive future telescope”

From Oak Ridge National Laboratory

December 19, 2019
Scott S Jones
jonesg@ornl.gov
865.241.6491

Researchers
Scott A Klasky
klasky@ornl.gov
865.241.9980

Ruonan Wang
wangr1@ornl.gov
865.574.8984

Norbert Podhorszki
pnb@ornl.gov
865.574.7159

For nearly three decades, scientists and engineers across the globe have worked on the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), a project focused on designing and building the world’s largest radio telescope.

SKA Square Kilometer Array

Although the SKA will collect enormous amounts of precise astronomical data in record time, scientific breakthroughs will only be possible with systems able to efficiently process that data.

Because construction of the SKA is not scheduled to begin until 2021, researchers cannot collect enough observational data to practice analyzing the huge quantities experts anticipate the telescope will produce. Instead, a team from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) in Australia, the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in the United States, and the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory (SHAO) in China recently used Summit, the world’s most powerful supercomputer, to simulate the SKA’s expected output. Summit is located at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, a DOE Office of Science User Facility at ORNL.

ORNL IBM AC922 SUMMIT supercomputer, No.1 on the TOP500. Credit: Carlos Jones, Oak Ridge National Laboratory/U.S. Dept. of Energy

An artist rendering of the SKA’s low-frequency, cone-shaped antennas in Western Australia. Credit: SKA Project Office.

“The Summit supercomputer provided a unique opportunity to test a simple SKA dataflow at the scale we are expecting from the telescope array,” said Andreas Wicenec, director of Data Intensive Astronomy at ICRAR.

To process the simulated data, the team relied on the ORNL-developed Adaptable IO System (ADIOS), an open-source input/output (I/O) framework led by ORNL’s Scott Klasky, who also leads the laboratory’s scientific data group. ADIOS is designed to speed up simulations by increasing the efficiency of I/O operations and to facilitate data transfers between high-performance computing systems and other facilities, which would otherwise be a complex and time-consuming task.

The SKA simulation on Summit marks the first time radio astronomy data have been processed at such a large scale and proves that scientists have the expertise, software tools, and computing resources that will be necessary to process and understand real data from the SKA.

“The scientific data group is dedicated to researching next-generation technology that can be developed and deployed for the most scientifically demanding applications on the world’s fastest computers,” Klasky said. “I am proud of all the hard work the ADIOS team and the SKA scientists have done with ICRAR, ORNL, and SHAO.”

Using two types of radio receivers, the telescope will detect radio light waves emanating from galaxies, the surroundings of black holes, and other objects of interest in outer space to help astronomers answer fundamental questions about the universe. Studying these weak, elusive waves requires an army of antennas.

The first phase of the SKA will have more than 130,000 low-frequency, cone-shaped antennas located in Western Australia and about 200 higher frequency, dish-shaped antennas located in South Africa. The international project team will eventually manage close to a million antennas to conduct unprecedented studies of astronomical phenomena.

To emulate the Western Australian portion of the SKA, the researchers ran two models on Summit—one of the antenna array and one of the early universe—through a software simulator designed by scientists from the University of Oxford that mimics the SKA’s data collection. The simulations generated 2.6 petabytes of data at 247 gigabytes per second.

“Generating such a vast amount of data with the antenna array simulator requires a lot of power and thousands of graphics processing units to work properly,” said ORNL software engineer Ruonan Wang. “Summit is probably the only computer in the world that can do this.”

Although the simulator typically runs on a single computer, the team used a specialized workflow management tool Wang helped ICRAR develop called the Data Activated Flow Graph Engine (DALiuGE) to efficiently scale the modeling capability up to 4,560 compute nodes on Summit. DALiuGE has built-in fault tolerance, ensuring that minor errors do not impede the workflow.

“The problem with traditional resources is that one problem can make the entire job fall apart,” Wang said. Wang earned his doctorate degree at the University of Western Australia, which manages ICRAR along with Curtin University.

The intense influx of data from the array simulations resulted in a performance bottleneck, which the team solved by reducing, processing, and storing the data using ADIOS. Researchers usually plug ADIOS straight into the I/O subsystem of a given application, but the simulator’s unusually complicated software meant the team had to customize a plug-in module to make the two resources compatible.

“This was far more complex than a normal application,” Wang said.

Wang began working on ADIOS1, the first iteration of the tool, 6 years ago during his time at ICRAR. Now, he serves as one of the main developers of the latest version, ADIOS2. His team aims to position ADIOS as a superior storage resource for the next generation of astronomy data and the default I/O solution for future telescopes beyond even the SKA’s gargantuan scope.

“The faster we can process data, the better we can understand the universe,” he said.

Funding for this work comes from DOE’s Office of Science.

The International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) is a joint venture between Curtin University and The University of Western Australia with support and funding from the State Government of Western Australia. ICRAR is helping to design and build the world’s largest radio telescope, the Square Kilometre Array.

See the full article here .

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ORNL is managed by UT-Battelle for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science. DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time.

From insideHPC: “Video: The Pawsey Supercomputing Centre, SKA, and HPC in Australia”

From insideHPC

October 12, 2019
Rich Brueckner

Magnus Cray XC40 supercomputer at Pawsey Supercomputer Centre Perth Australia

Galaxy Cray XC30 Series Supercomputer at Pawsey Supercomputer Centre Perth Australia

In this video from the HPC User Forum at Argonne, Mark Stickells presents: HPC and Data Down Under: The Pawsey Supercomputing Centre, SKA, and HPC in Australia.

“The Pawsey Supercomputing Centre is an unincorporated joint venture between CSIRO, Curtin University, Edith Cowan University, Murdoch University and The University of Western Australia. It is supported by the Western Australian and Federal Governments. The Centre is one of two, Tier-1, High Performance Computing facilities in Australia, whose primary function is to accelerate scientific research for the benefit of the nation. Our service and expertise in supercomputing, data, cloud services and visualisation, enables research across a spread of domains including astronomy, life sciences, medicine, energy, resources and artificial intelligence.”

SKA

SKA

See the full article here .

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Founded on December 28, 2006, insideHPC is a blog that distills news and events in the world of HPC and presents them in bite-sized nuggets of helpfulness as a resource for supercomputing professionals. As one reader said, we’re sifting through all the news so you don’t have to!

If you would like to contact me with suggestions, comments, corrections, errors or new company announcements, please send me an email at rich@insidehpc.com. Or you can send me mail at:

insideHPC
2825 NW Upshur
Suite G
Portland, OR 97239

Phone: (503) 877-5048

From Symmetry: “With open data, scientists share their work”

From Symmetry

08/20/19
Meredith Fore

Illustration by Sandbox Studio, Chicago

There are barriers to making scientific data open, but doing so has already contributed to scientific progress.

It could be said that astronomy, one of the oldest sciences, was one of the first fields to have open data. The open records of Chinese astronomers from 1054 A.D. allowed astronomer Carlo Otto Lampland to identify the Crab Nebula as the remnant of a supernova in 1921.

Supernova remnant Crab nebula. NASA/ESA Hubble

In 1705 Edward Halley used the previous observations of Johannes Kepler and Petrus Apianus—who did their work before Halley was old enough to use a telescope—to deduce the orbit of his eponymous comet.

Comet 1P/Halley as taken March 8, 1986 by W. Liller, Easter Island, part of the International Halley Watch (IHW) Large Scale Phenomena Network.
NASA/W. Liller

In science, making data open means making available, free of charge, the observations or other information collected in a scientific study for the purpose of allowing other researchers to examine it for themselves, either to verify it or to conduct new analyses.

Scientists continue to use open data to make new discoveries today. In 2010, a team of scientists led by Professor Doug Finkbeiner at Harvard University found vast gamma-ray bubbles above and below the Milky Way. The accomplishment was compared to the discovery of a new continent on Earth. The scientists didn’t find the bubbles by making their own observations; they did it by analyzing publicly available data from the Fermi Gamma Ray Telescope.

NASA/Fermi LAT

NASA/Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope

“Open data often can be used to answer other kinds of questions that the people who collected the data either weren’t interested in asking, or they just never thought to ask,” says Kyle Cranmer, a professor at New York University. By making scientific data available, “you’re enabling a lot of new science by the community to go forward in a more efficient and powerful way.”

Cranmer is a member of ATLAS, one of the two general-purpose experiments that, among other things, co-discovered the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

CERN ATLAS Image Claudia Marcelloni

CERN ATLAS Higgs Event

He and other CERN researchers recently published a letter in Nature Physics titled “Open is not enough,” which shares lessons learned about providing open data in high-energy physics. The CERN Open Data Portal, which facilitates public access of datasets from CERN experiments, now contains more than two petabytes of information.

Computing at CERN

The fields of both particle physics and astrophysics have seen rapid developments in the use and spread of open data, says Ulisses Barres, an astrophysicist at the Brazilian Center for Research in Physics. “Astronomy is going to, in the next decade, increase the amount of data that it produces by a factor of hundreds,” he says. “As the amount of data grows, there is more pressure for increasing our capacity to convert information into knowledge.”

The Square Kilometer Array Telescope—built in Australia and South Africa and set to turn on in the 2020s—is expected to produce about 600 terabytes of data per year.

SKA Square Kilometer Array

SKA South Africa

Raw data from studies conducted during the site selection process are already available on the SKA website, with a warning that “these files are very large indeed, and before you download them you should check whether your local file system will be able to handle them.”

Barres sees the growth in open data as an opportunity for developing nations to participate in the global science community in new ways. He and a group of fellow astrophysicists helped develop something called the Open Universe Initiative “with the objective of stimulating a dramatic increase in the availability and usability of space science data, extending the potential of scientific discovery to new participants in all parts of the world and empowering global educational services.”

The initiative, proposed by the government of Italy, is currently in the “implementation” phase within the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs.

“I think that data is this proper entry point for science development in places that don’t have much science developed yet,” Barres says. “Because it’s there, it’s available, there is much more data than we can properly analyze.”

There are barriers to implementing open data. One is the concept of ownership—a lab might not want to release data that they could use for another project or might worry about proper credit and attribution. Another is the natural human fear of being accused of being wrong or having your data used irresponsibly.

But one of the biggest barriers, according to physics professor Jesse Thaler of MIT, is making the data understandable. “From the user perspective, every single aspect of using public data is challenging,” Thaler says.

Think of a high school student’s chemistry lab notebook. A student might mark certain measurements in her data table with a star, to remind herself that she used a different instrument to take those measurements. Or she may use acronyms to name different samples. Unless she writes these schemes down, another student wouldn’t know the star’s significance and wouldn’t be able to know what the samples were.

This has been a challenge for the CERN Open Data Portal, Cranmer says. “It’s very well curated, but it’s hard to use, because the data has got a lot of structure to it. It’s very complicated. You have to put additional effort to make it more usable.”

And for a lot of scientists already working to manage gigantic projects, doing extra work to make their data useable to outside groups—well, “that’s just not mission critical,” he says. But Thaler adds that the CMS experiment has been very responsive to the needs of outside users.

CERN CMS Higgs Event

“Figuring out how to release data is challenging because you want to provide as much relevant information to outside users as possible,” Thaler says. “But it’s often not obvious, until outside users actually get their hands on the data, what information is relevant.”

Still, there are many examples of open data benefiting astrophysics and particle physics. Members of the wider scientific community have discovered exoplanets through public data from the Kepler Space Telescope. When the Gaia spacecraft mapped the positions of 1.7 billion stars and released them as open data, scientists flocked to hackathons hosted by the Flatiron Institute to interpret it and produced about 20 papers’ worth of research.

Open data policies have allowed for more accountability. The physics community was able to thoroughly check data from the first black hole collisions detected by LIGO and question a proposed dark-matter signal from the DAMA/LIBRA experiment.

DAMA-LIBRA at Gran Sasso

Gran Sasso LABORATORI NAZIONALI del GRAN SASSO, located in the Abruzzo region of central Italy

Open data has also allowed for new collaborations and has nourished existing ones. Thaler, who is a theorist, says the dialogue between experimentalists and theorists has always been strong, but “open data is an opportunity to accelerate that conversation,” he says.

For Cari Cesarotti, a graduate student who uses CMS Open Data for research in particle physics theory at Harvard, one of the most important benefits of open data is how it maximizes the scientific value of data experimentalists have to work very hard to obtain.

“Colliders are really expensive and quite laborious to build and test,” she says. “So the more that we can squeeze out utility using the tools that we already have—to me, that’s the right thing to do, to try to get as much mileage as we possibly can out of the data set.”

See the full article here .

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Symmetry is a joint Fermilab/SLAC publication.

From SKA: “International SKA science conference kicks off”

SKA South Africa

From SKA

4.8.19

Mathieu Isidro
Deputy Communications & Outreach Manager
SKA Organisation
Email: m.isidro@skatelescope.org
Phone: +44 (0) 7824 016 126

Close to 300 astronomers from 20 countries have come together in Cheshire, UK for the international SKA science conference New Science enabled by New Techniques in the SKA era, looking at the breadth of science the SKA will enable and the latest science from current SKA-related facilities around the world. The meeting is organised by the SKA Organisation and hosted near the SKA Global Headquarters at Jodrell Bank.

Three days are dedicated to talks covering recent results with the newly operational SKA precursor telescopes ASKAP and MeerKAT as well as MWA and HERA and SKA pathfinder facilities such as LOFAR [all images below]. Two days are also dedicated to discussions around the future key science projects with the SKA telescopes to allow group to form collaborations and prepare themselves.

“We are delighted to receive our colleagues from around the globe here in the UK” said the Chair of the Scientific Organising Committee Evan Keane “We’re expecting to hear about exciting results from the SKA’s pathfinder and precursor facilities as well as to have crucial discussions on some of the future observing programmes, covering the whole breadth of science to be done with the SKA ”

See the full article here .

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SKA ASKAP Pathefinder Telescope

SKA Meerkat telescope, 90 km outside the small Northern Cape town of Carnarvon, SA

SKA Meerkat Telescope

Murchison Widefield Array,SKA Murchison Widefield Array, Boolardy station in outback Western Australia, at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO)

SKA Murchison Wide Field Array

SKA Hera at SKA South Africa

SKA Pathfinder – LOFAR location at Potsdam via Google Images

About SKA

The Square Kilometre Array will be the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope. The total collecting area will be approximately one square kilometre giving 50 times the sensitivity, and 10 000 times the survey speed, of the best current-day telescopes. The SKA will be built in Southern Africa and in Australia. Thousands of receptors will extend to distances of 3 000 km from the central regions. The SKA will address fundamental unanswered questions about our Universe including how the first stars and galaxies formed after the Big Bang, how dark energy is accelerating the expansion of the Universe, the role of magnetism in the cosmos, the nature of gravity, and the search for life beyond Earth. Construction of phase one of the SKA is scheduled to start in 2016. The SKA Organisation, with its headquarters at Jodrell Bank Observatory, near Manchester, UK, was established in December 2011 as a not-for-profit company in order to formalise relationships between the international partners and centralise the leadership of the project.

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project is an international effort to build the world’s largest radio telescope, led by SKA Organisation. The SKA will conduct transformational science to improve our understanding of the Universe and the laws of fundamental physics, monitoring the sky in unprecedented detail and mapping it hundreds of times faster than any current facility.

Already supported by 10 member countries – Australia, Canada, China, India, Italy, New Zealand, South Africa, Sweden, The Netherlands and the United Kingdom – SKA Organisation has brought together some of the world’s finest scientists, engineers and policy makers and more than 100 companies and research institutions across 20 countries in the design and development of the telescope. Construction of the SKA is set to start in 2018, with early science observations in 2020.

From SKA: “SKA’s Infrastructure consortia complete their detailed design work for the SKA sites”

From SKA

25 February 2019

The two engineering consortia tasked with designing all the essential infrastructure for the SKA sites in Australia and South Africa have formally concluded their work, bringing to a close nearly five years of collaboration both within and between the consortia.

Infrastructure Australia (INAU) and Infrastructure South Africa (INSA) were each led by institutions with great expertise in radio astronomy projects: Australia’s CSIRO, which designed, built and operates the SKA precursor telescope ASKAP at its Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO)…

Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) is a radio telescope array located at Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO) in the Australian Mid West. ASKAP consists of 36 identical parabolic antennas, each 12 metres in diameter, working together as a single instrument with a total collecting area of approximately 4,000 square metres.

SKA Murchison Widefield Array, Boolardy station in outback Western Australia, at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO)

…and the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO), which designed, built and operates the SKA precursor telescope MeerKAT. Industry partners also played key roles in both consortia*, while the European Union’s Research and Innovation programme Horizon 2020 awarded an additional €5M to conduct further work at both sites and at the SKA Global Headquarters in the UK.

SKA Meerkat telescope, South African design

SKA Meerkat telescope(s), 90 km outside the small Northern Cape town of Carnarvon, SA

The consortia were responsible for designing everything required to be able to deploy and operate the SKA in its two host countries, from roads, buildings, power, to RFI shielding, water and sanitation. Both CSIRO and SARAO developed valuable expertise from delivering the two precursor telescopes, which they applied to their work designing the SKA’s site infrastructure.

“This is the culmination of many years of development on both sites in preparation for the start of construction of the SKA,” says Gary Davis, the SKA’s Head of Operations Planning and chair of the review panel. “Both consortia have done a stellar job in collaboration with one another to design the crucial infrastructure that’ll support the SKA.”

A major goal of the two consortia was to collaborate with each other in order to develop a common engineering approach, share knowledge and provide lessons learnt through the design and delivery of SKA precursors.

“From the start we developed what we called the GIG, the good ideas group” says Ant Schinckel, Infrastructure Australia’s Consortium Lead. “Our engineers would continuously engage with each other to discuss issues in both countries and find common solutions that could be applied to both sites” complements Tracy Cheetham, Infrastructure South Africa’s Consortium Lead.

“I’d like to thank both teams for their excellent work” said Martin Austin, the SKA’s Infrastructure Project Manager “The quality of the design and their approach to safety means that we can now carry this work forward with a high degree of confidence, supported by both CSIRO and SARAO and their industry partners.”

INAU and INSA formed part of a global effort by 12 international engineering consortia, representing 500 engineers and scientists in 20 countries. Nine of the consortia focused on the SKA’s core elements, while three others were tasked with developing advanced instrumentation.

In 2018 and 2019 the nine consortia are having their Critical Design Reviews (CDRs), during which the proposed design must meet the project’s tough engineering requirements to be approved, before a construction proposal for the SKA can be developed.

In June and July 2018, both infrastructure consortia had successful CDRs and subsequently made the final refinements to their designs. With that work complete the consortia now formally disband, although the SKA will continue to work closely with former members in the months ahead as the overall System CDR approaches, to ensure that the infrastructure design aligns with all of the other components.

*Infrastructure Australia consortium members included the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Aurecon Australia and Rider Levett Bucknall.

Infrastructure South Africa consortium members included the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO), Aurecon South Africa and HHO Africa.

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

SKA ASKAP Pathefinder Telescope

SKA Meerkat telescope, 90 km outside the small Northern Cape town of Carnarvon, SA

SKA Meerkat Telescope

Murchison Widefield Array,SKA Murchison Widefield Array, Boolardy station in outback Western Australia, at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO)

SKA Murchison Wide Field Array
About SKA

The Square Kilometre Arraywill be the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope. The total collecting area will be approximately one square kilometre giving 50 times the sensitivity, and 10 000 times the survey speed, of the best current-day telescopes. The SKA will be built in Southern Africa and in Australia. Thousands of receptors will extend to distances of 3 000 km from the central regions. The SKA will address fundamental unanswered questions about our Universe including how the first stars and galaxies formed after the Big Bang, how dark energy is accelerating the expansion of the Universe, the role of magnetism in the cosmos, the nature of gravity, and the search for life beyond Earth. Construction of phase one of the SKA is scheduled to start in 2016. The SKA Organisation, with its headquarters at Jodrell Bank Observatory, near Manchester, UK, was established in December 2011 as a not-for-profit company in order to formalise relationships between the international partners and centralise the leadership of the project.

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project is an international effort to build the world’s largest radio telescope, led by SKA Organisation. The SKA will conduct transformational science to improve our understanding of the Universe and the laws of fundamental physics, monitoring the sky in unprecedented detail and mapping it hundreds of times faster than any current facility.

Already supported by 10 member countries – Australia, Canada, China, India, Italy, New Zealand, South Africa, Sweden, The Netherlands and the United Kingdom – SKA Organisation has brought together some of the world’s finest scientists, engineers and policy makers and more than 100 companies and research institutions across 20 countries in the design and development of the telescope. Construction of the SKA is set to start in 2018, with early science observations in 2020.

From SKA: “Canadian-led Central Signal Processor consortium successfully concludes SKA design work”

From SKA

Members of the Central Signal Processor consortium at SKA Global Headquarters during the Critical Design Review in September 2018 (Credit: SKA Organisation)

20 February 2019

The international Central Signal Processor (CSP) consortium has concluded its design work on the SKA, marking the end of five years’ work comprised of 11 signatory members from 8 countries with more than 10 additional participating organisations.

The consortium, led by the National Research Council of Canada (NRC)*, has designed the elements that will together form the “processing heart” of the SKA. The CSP is the first stage of processing for the masses of digitised astronomical signals collected by the telescope’s receivers. It’s where the correlation and beamforming takes place to make sense of the jumble of signals, before the data is sent onwards to the Science Data Processor. At that stage, the data is ready to be turned into detailed astronomical images of the sky.

The CSP includes the Pulsar Search and Timing sub-elements, which enable astronomers to detect and characterise pulsars and fast transients. This will facilitate the most comprehensive and ambitious survey yet to detect all pulsars in our own galaxy as well as the first extragalactic pulsars. The Pulsar Search sub-element is based on a hybrid architecture of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) and Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) computing boards. The design team was led by the University of Manchester (UK), University of Oxford (UK) and the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (Germany) supported by input from INAF (Italy), New Zealand Alliance, STFC ATC Edinburgh (UK), and ASTRON (the Netherlands). The Pulsar Timing sub-element is based on GPUs. The design team consisted of participants from Swinburne University of Technology (Australia) and the New Zealand Alliance.

Low CBF liquid-cooled Perentie Gemini Processing Board (left), Mid CBF Air-cooled TALON-DX Processing Board (right).

As part of their work, the consortium designed the FPGA computing boards that will perform correlation and beamforming (CBF) on the signals from the SKA. The CBF for the SKA-mid telescope -to be located in South Africa- is based on Intel FPGA technology and was led by the NRC with support from MDA, a Maxar Technologies company, AUT University (New Zealand), and INAF. The CBF for the SKA-low telescope -to be located in Australia- is based on Xilinx technology, was led by CSIRO with support from ASTRON and AUT University. Hundreds of these boards are required to meet the demanding processing requirements.

The Local Monitoring and Control sub-element was led by the NRC with contributions from MDA, INAF, and NCRA (India).

The consortium was given a full pass by the review panel during the CSP Critical Design Review (CDR) in September, the first SKA engineering consortium to receive this result. With very few actions required following the review, the consortium has now concluded its work.

“This is an extremely complex system – it has to process as many bits every 15 seconds as all the bits that are flowing through the global internet today,” said Consortium Lead Luc Simard of the NRC. “That’s a huge processing challenge at a site with limited electrical power and cooling power, and we have to fit a lot of hardware in a tight, restricted environment. To meet this challenge we needed a team of the highest quality – we have the best of the best and working with them has been a real honour. I’m really thankful for all their work.”

The consortium was formed in late 2013 as one of 12 international engineering consortia tasked with designing the SKA, a global effort representing 500 engineers in 20 countries. Nine consortia focused on core elements, while three developed advanced instrumentation for the telescope. The nine consortia are now at CDR stage, where an expert panel examines each design proposal against the SKA’s stringent requirements.

Now that its work is complete the consortium formally disbands, although the SKA Organisation will work closely with participating countries to prepare for the overall System CDR and the development of the SKA construction proposal.

“What made the design challenge so difficult are the exacting requirements for a telescope to deliver SKA telescope transformational science,” said Philip Gibbs, SKA Organisation Project Manager for CSP. “The system has to meet observing requirements that may include imaging, as well as VLBI, and pulsar search and timing, all at the same time. As well as the power and space issues on site, we’ve naturally also been constrained by the cost involved in providing a solution.”

“To reach this point is a testament to the tremendous effort of all the institutions involved in designing CSP – my heartfelt thanks go to them. We look forward to continued collaboration as we progress down the road towards construction of the SKA.”

*The CSP Consortium Project Management Office was led by a collaboration between the NRC and MDA, a contracted industry partner. Active consortium members (signatories) at the conclusion of the work included: Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON), Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) (Australia), Swinburne University of Technology (Australia), Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (Germany), National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) (Italy), New Zealand Alliance (AUT University, Massey University, University of Auckland, Compucon New Zealand and Open Parallel Ltd.), the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) (UK), University of Manchester (UK), and University of Oxford (UK).

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

SKA ASKAP Pathefinder Telescope

SKA Meerkat telescope, 90 km outside the small Northern Cape town of Carnarvon, SA

SKA Meerkat Telescope

Murchison Widefield Array,SKA Murchison Widefield Array, Boolardy station in outback Western Australia, at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO)

SKA Murchison Wide Field Array
About SKA

The Square Kilometre Arraywill be the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope. The total collecting area will be approximately one square kilometre giving 50 times the sensitivity, and 10 000 times the survey speed, of the best current-day telescopes. The SKA will be built in Southern Africa and in Australia. Thousands of receptors will extend to distances of 3 000 km from the central regions. The SKA will address fundamental unanswered questions about our Universe including how the first stars and galaxies formed after the Big Bang, how dark energy is accelerating the expansion of the Universe, the role of magnetism in the cosmos, the nature of gravity, and the search for life beyond Earth. Construction of phase one of the SKA is scheduled to start in 2016. The SKA Organisation, with its headquarters at Jodrell Bank Observatory, near Manchester, UK, was established in December 2011 as a not-for-profit company in order to formalise relationships between the international partners and centralise the leadership of the project.

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project is an international effort to build the world’s largest radio telescope, led by SKA Organisation. The SKA will conduct transformational science to improve our understanding of the Universe and the laws of fundamental physics, monitoring the sky in unprecedented detail and mapping it hundreds of times faster than any current facility.

Already supported by 10 member countries – Australia, Canada, China, India, Italy, New Zealand, South Africa, Sweden, The Netherlands and the United Kingdom – SKA Organisation has brought together some of the world’s finest scientists, engineers and policy makers and more than 100 companies and research institutions across 20 countries in the design and development of the telescope. Construction of the SKA is set to start in 2018, with early science observations in 2020.

From SKA: “Canada’s CHIME telescope joins SKA pathfinder family”

From SKA

21 November 2018

CHIME Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment -A partnership between the University of British Columbia, the University of Toronto, McGill University, Yale and the National Research Council of Canada, at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory in British Columbia, at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory in British Columbia

Great news: the SKA pathfinder family has a new member! We welcome CHIME, the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment 🇨🇦, to the group of facilities carrying out SKA-related science and technology studies around the world. Astronomers are using the signals CHIME collects to measure the expansion history of the Universe over a period of 4 billion years of cosmic time! CHIME is also expected to find thousands of new Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) – a phenomenon consisting of short bursts of radio waves from far outside our Milky Way galaxy, but of unknown origin.

“CHIME’s observations will set the scene for the next generation of experiments with the SKA, which will be able to see even further back into the history of the Universe, observing hydrogen from a time when the Universe was less than a billion years old,” says Canadian SKA Science Director Prof. Bryan Gaensler.

The CHIME project is co-led by the @universityofbc, @McGillUniversity, @UniversityToronto and the National Research Council of Canada. Find out more on our website: http://skatel.org/CHIME-SKA-pathfinder_mXn0S

Canada’s largest radio telescope, the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME), has been officially granted Square Kilometre Array (SKA) pathfinder status.

SKA pathfinders and precursors are facilities all over the world involved in SKA-related science and technology studies, and provide vital input for the teams developing the SKA. While precursor telescopes are located at the future SKA sites, pathfinders are dotted around the globe.

Located at the National Research Council of Canada’s Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory (DRAO) in British Columbia, CHIME is an unusual telescope with no moving parts and a huge field of view, which stretches almost from the northern to the southern horizon.

Astronomers are using the signals it collects to measure the expansion history of the Universe over a period of 4 billion years of cosmic time, by creating a 3D map of its most abundant element: hydrogen. Studying the Universe’s expansion in detail may provide evidence of what is causing its acceleration, one possible candidate being the mysterious Dark Energy.

CHIME is also ideal for other SKA-related studies, including discovering large numbers of Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) – a phenomenon consisting of short bursts of radio waves from far outside our Milky Way galaxy, but of unknown origin – and monitoring Galactic radio pulsars.

“CHIME’s observations will set the scene for the next generation of experiments with the SKA, which will be able to see even further back into the history of the Universe, observing hydrogen from a time when the Universe was less than a billion years old,” said Canadian SKA Science Director Prof. Bryan Gaensler.

“Canada has a rich history in radio astronomy, and CHIME has continued this tradition by bringing together scientists and engineers from across the country. CHIME has also proven to be a fantastic platform for training young students and postdocs on the relevant technologies. These are the next generation of scientists who will be keen to use the SKA in the next decade and beyond,” Prof. Gaensler added.

“With CHIME we are performing exciting measurements of cosmology and FRBs which will help to frame the questions that the SKA is being designed to address,” said Prof. Mark Halpern from the University of British Columbia, which co-leads the project with McGill University, the University of Toronto and the National Research Council of Canada.

“We expect to find thousands of new FRBs, completely transforming this field, so what we learn from CHIME will be hugely valuable when planning future observations with the SKA.”

CHIME is a relatively new facility, achieving first light in September 2017. It brings the number of SKA pathfinders to 15, in addition to the four SKA precursor facilities in South Africa and Australia.

Read more on SKA precursors and pathfinders

Read more about the CHIME

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

SKA ASKAP Pathefinder Telescope

SKA Meerkat telescope, 90 km outside the small Northern Cape town of Carnarvon, SA

SKA Meerkat Telescope

Murchison Widefield Array,SKA Murchison Widefield Array, Boolardy station in outback Western Australia, at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO)

SKA Murchison Wide Field Array
About SKA

The Square Kilometre Arraywill be the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope. The total collecting area will be approximately one square kilometre giving 50 times the sensitivity, and 10 000 times the survey speed, of the best current-day telescopes. The SKA will be built in Southern Africa and in Australia. Thousands of receptors will extend to distances of 3 000 km from the central regions. The SKA will address fundamental unanswered questions about our Universe including how the first stars and galaxies formed after the Big Bang, how dark energy is accelerating the expansion of the Universe, the role of magnetism in the cosmos, the nature of gravity, and the search for life beyond Earth. Construction of phase one of the SKA is scheduled to start in 2016. The SKA Organisation, with its headquarters at Jodrell Bank Observatory, near Manchester, UK, was established in December 2011 as a not-for-profit company in order to formalise relationships between the international partners and centralise the leadership of the project.

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project is an international effort to build the world’s largest radio telescope, led by SKA Organisation. The SKA will conduct transformational science to improve our understanding of the Universe and the laws of fundamental physics, monitoring the sky in unprecedented detail and mapping it hundreds of times faster than any current facility.

Already supported by 10 member countries – Australia, Canada, China, India, Italy, New Zealand, South Africa, Sweden, The Netherlands and the United Kingdom – SKA Organisation has brought together some of the world’s finest scientists, engineers and policy makers and more than 100 companies and research institutions across 20 countries in the design and development of the telescope. Construction of the SKA is set to start in 2018, with early science observations in 2020.

From SKA: “SKA joins research data revolution through ESCAPE project”

From SKA

20 November 2018

The SKA was identified as a landmark project in the European Commission’s infrastructure roadmap, the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) in 2016. Above are the physical science ESFRI projects in astronomy, astroparticle and particle physics that form the focus of the ESCAPE cluster (clockwise from top left: ELT, CTA, FAIR, KM3NeT, EST, HL-LHC, SKA).

ESCAPE brings together 31 partner projects and institutions.

The SKA has joined 30 fellow research infrastructures to collaborate on a new science data initiative, which forms part of efforts to create a European cloud for scientific research.

Launched today, ESCAPE (The European Science Cluster of Astronomy & Particle Physics ESFRI Research Infrastructures) is supported by €16 million of funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Framework with the purpose of finding solutions to shared data challenges.

“For the SKA, our participation in ESCAPE will focus on developing technology and processes that will inform the global network of SKA Regional Centres (SRCs),” says Dr Antonio Chrysostomou, SKA Organisation Head of Science Operations Planning. SRCs will be hubs spread around the world which will enable researchers to access SKA science data products.

“We want the SKA community to have the same experience wherever they are in the world, so prototyping around how to share, access and visualize data, and how the process can then be scaled up to a global level, will provide important lessons for us.”

ESCAPE funding will enable SKA Organisation to bring on board personnel to focus on the project’s work packages relating to developing a science platform for data sharing, interoperability and communication using Virtual Observatory protocols, software deployment and user interfaces.

ESCAPE involves 31 partners at the cutting edge of research in astronomy and particle physics, including the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA), Joint Institute for VLBI ERIC (JIV-ERIC), ASTRON, Istituto Nazionale d’Astrofisica (INAF), the European Southern Observatory (ESO), and CERN, with the project being led by IN2P3, the French National Institute of Nuclear and Particle Physics.

Cherenkov Telescope Array, http://www.isdc.unige.ch/cta/ at Cerro Paranal, located in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile on Cerro Paranal at 2,635 m (8,645 ft) altitude, 120 km (70 mi) south of Antofagasta; and at at the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC), Roque de los Muchachos Observatory in La Palma, Spain searches for cosmic rays

European VLBI

SKA LOFAR core (“superterp”) near Exloo, Netherlands

INAF Telescopio Nazionale Galileo, a 3.58-meter Italian telescope, located at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands, Spain Altitude 2,396 m (7,861 ft).

“It is the first time that many of the greatest European scientific facilities in physics and astronomy have combined forces to make their data and software interoperable and open, committing to make the European Science Cloud a reality,” says IN2P3’s Dr Giovanni Lamanna, Principal Investigator of ESCAPE. “This is an important milestone for European scientific research.”

The European Open Science Cloud project (EOSC) project aims to facilitate universal access to scientific data through a single online platform, allowing both professional researchers and the general public to re-use data produced by other scientists. It is an effort to harness the full potential of the vast amounts of data that will be created by next-generation facilities like the SKA.

“The scope of the SKA, both in terms of its global footprint and its scientific challenge, demands a paradigm shift in approach if its potential benefits are to be fully realised,” adds Dr Chrysostomou. “EOSC will help to promote a culture of accessibility and rigour that can only benefit astronomy in this multi-wavelength, ‘multi-messenger’ era.”

Read the official ESCAPE press release here.

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

SKA ASKAP Pathefinder Telescope

SKA Meerkat telescope, 90 km outside the small Northern Cape town of Carnarvon, SA

SKA Meerkat Telescope

Murchison Widefield Array,SKA Murchison Widefield Array, Boolardy station in outback Western Australia, at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO)

SKA Murchison Wide Field Array
About SKA

The Square Kilometre Arraywill be the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope. The total collecting area will be approximately one square kilometre giving 50 times the sensitivity, and 10 000 times the survey speed, of the best current-day telescopes. The SKA will be built in Southern Africa and in Australia. Thousands of receptors will extend to distances of 3 000 km from the central regions. The SKA will address fundamental unanswered questions about our Universe including how the first stars and galaxies formed after the Big Bang, how dark energy is accelerating the expansion of the Universe, the role of magnetism in the cosmos, the nature of gravity, and the search for life beyond Earth. Construction of phase one of the SKA is scheduled to start in 2016. The SKA Organisation, with its headquarters at Jodrell Bank Observatory, near Manchester, UK, was established in December 2011 as a not-for-profit company in order to formalise relationships between the international partners and centralise the leadership of the project.

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project is an international effort to build the world’s largest radio telescope, led by SKA Organisation. The SKA will conduct transformational science to improve our understanding of the Universe and the laws of fundamental physics, monitoring the sky in unprecedented detail and mapping it hundreds of times faster than any current facility.

Already supported by 10 member countries – Australia, Canada, China, India, Italy, New Zealand, South Africa, Sweden, The Netherlands and the United Kingdom – SKA Organisation has brought together some of the world’s finest scientists, engineers and policy makers and more than 100 companies and research institutions across 20 countries in the design and development of the telescope. Construction of the SKA is set to start in 2018, with early science observations in 2020.