Technology set in place for the SKA telescope in the Karoo {writer: Staff reporter}

South Africa is bolstering its commitment to science and technology, and highlighting the country as one of the world’s premier astronomy destinations.

Following the announcement by Intel Corporation South Africa and the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) South Africa project, of their agreement to partner in evaluating the highest Intel® technologies in processing the enormous data rates produced by radio telescopes, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research’s Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) is in the process of upgrading its capacity in computational power to cement South Africa’s position on the TOP500 High Performance Computing list and ensure its capability to support its initiative for the SKA bid.

The CHPC is an initiative supported by the Department of Science and Technology (DST), and which has been established over the last few years as a supercomputing centre serving the country’s scientists.

The state-of-the-art facility is supported by the latest in data centre power and network infrastructure, and operates a number of supercomputers with different architectures. These include a Blue Gene/P machine, a sun hybrid cluster and symmetric multiprocessing systems, and a graphics processing unit-based cluster.

The CHPC supports a number of research labs on its premises, notably the ACE Lab, which is developing new computing hardware and software.

In addition, the Centre is spearheading an initiative to establish a very large data storage capability for the country’s scientists.

SKA SA is another DST initiative that is bidding to win the right to host the €1.5-billion SKA telescope. It is currently building the KAT-7/MeerKAT radio telescope, SKA precursor arrays in the rapidly developing Karoo astronomy reserve, and supports a Youth into Science and Engineering Programme for bursaries and training programmes.

These two major initiatives, taken together, represent a significant capability. It is no accident that the MeerKAT Engineering Office (and MeerKAT Control Centre) and the CHPC are situated only a few kilometres from each other, and are currently being linked into the new South African National Research Network, providing superfast computer networks for research.

The success already shown by the partnership in these two initiatives is evident from participation of flagship projects in the utilisation of the CHPC resources in providing guidance in the design of the SKA dish and astronomy projects, which makes use of the resources for analytical work.

Now that the MeerKAT team has the KAT-7 telescope operational in the Karoo and a 10-gigabyte-per-second (in the first phase) data link coming online in July from the Karoo into the CHPC, these two initiatives will link up to process the large data volumes in novel ways that may open up new scientific areas of investigation. For example, a joint pilot project to capture and process a large amount of telescope “voltage data” is planned for later this year.

As further support to these kinds of efforts, Intel South Africa and SKA SA recently announced they have been partnering to evaluate the highest Intel® technologies in processing the enormous data rates produced by radio telescopes.

The parties entered into an agreement to make these technologies available to the SKA SA, and put forth a joint engineering effort to further test and optimise them.

This collaboration in applying the cutting-edge technology to raw data capture and online stream processing pushes the envelope of what is possible today in scientific instruments, and puts South African scientists and engineers at the forefront of this field. They believe their efforts will help to strengthen the case for an African SKA.

The completion of the Center of Competence within the CHPC – which aims at providing a platform to transfer the technology developed for SKA, such as the reconfigurable open architecture computing hardware board, for adoption by the broader scientific community outside astronomy – is merely one of the strengths of South Africa’s ability to deliver major projects.

The synergy is there, and the opportunity is now to showcase to the world that South Africa is extremely well placed in terms of infrastructure, technology and skills to host mega science instruments such as the SKA.