“It is known as the SKA Science Data Processor, or the ‘brain’ of the telescope”, said Professor Andreas Wicenec, head of data intensive astronomy at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research.
According to the researchers, the SKA - a collection of telescopes or instruments to be spread over long distances - is the world’s largest science project, with the low frequency part of the telescope alone set to have more than a quarter of a million antennas facing the sky.
The prototype software execution framework provides the control and monitoring environment to execute millions of tasks and, according to Prof Wicenec, is ‘data activated’, meaning software triggers the applications needed to process the individual data items.
Professor Tao An from Shanghai Astronomical Observatory said the prototype was initially run on 500 compute nodes of the supercomputer and then extended to 1000 nodes.
“The next step is to ramp up the number of individual items we’re deploying and then increase the number of compute nodes to what we are expecting for the SKA computer, which is about 8500,” he observed.
Prof Wicenec claims the system is running 66,000 items and the next stage will be a few million.