Overview of SKA & ASKAP
Sky Survey Data Management Workshop
Research A/Prof Kevin Vinsen
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1E+12!
1E+11!
1E+10!
1E+09!
100000000!
10000000!
1000000!
100000!
10000!
1000!
100!
Numbers/!
night!
1500
1600
1700
1800
Year!
1900
2000
Doubling time < 1 year
3
distance
10
1
0
102 =100 x bigger =1,000,000 square
m
=1 square km
10000 square m
1000 square m
Who will build the SKA?
20 Countries working together in a Global Project
Cost = $3 billion AUD
Adapted from Quinn
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Where to build it?
! Away from radio interference (cities, towns and people!)
! Flat open spaces for 10s - 1000s km
! Dry and geological stable
! Good global location for astronomy
! Access to high technology industry and infrastructure
! Access to a technical and scientific community
! Stable economy and government
Southern Africa
Western Australia
Adapted from Quinn
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South Africa & Australia
Kenya
Zaire
Mozambique
Namibia
Botswana
Mauritius
Madagascar
South Africa
Final international decision on site by 2012
How quiet do we need to
be?
Energy of a falling
snowflake < 30 microjoules
Energy collected by ALL
radio telescopes, ever,
less than a falling snowflake
Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory
(MRO)
Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory
(MRO)
Video courtesy of CSIRO
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An illustration of the speed of the
Pathfinder
• Ilana’s image of Centaurus
• Required 1200 hours observing on the
Australia Telescope Compact Array in
Narrabri
• The Pathfinder will take about 10 minutes
Adapted from Cornwell
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ASKAP A1
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SKA Facts
• The SKA could detect airport radars on planets 50 light
years away
• The dishes of the SKA will produce 20 times the current
global internet traffic
• The aperture arrays in the SKA will produce 250 times the
current global Internet traffic.
• If the raw data produced by SKA were saved it would
require about one thousand million 1Gb memory sticks per
day.
• SKA processing power is equivalent to 1 billion top range
PCs
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Petascale Data Flow
ASKAP 70 Tb/s, MWA 320 Gb/s, SKA 7Pb/s
ASKAP 1.5 PF/s, SKA >1 EF/s
ASKAP 5GB/s, MWA 8 GB/s,
SKA 300 GB/s - 1PB/s
ASKAP 13 PB, SKA 800 - 8000 PB
ASKAP 100 TF/s, SKA 30 PF/s
ASKAP & MWA 6 TB/day, SKA 900 TB/day
ASKAP 100 TF/s,
SKA 30 - 300 PF/s
ASKAP 3 PB/year,
SKA 18 - 180 PB/year
CSIRO
ICRAR
Adapted from Cornwell & Quinn
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SKA ICT Challenges
Adapted from Cornwell
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Grand Challenge Space
1020 b/s
SKA
ASKAP
0
0
0 1020 FLOPS
1010
Google
1020 bytes
The unique SKA challenge
Sum of all PCs
LSST
LHC
Bandwidth
•
SKA Pathfinder Cubes ~ 5 TB
which implies 500 sec read time at
10GB/sec
•
typical survey consists of ~1000
cubes = 5-6 days read time
•
would like 100-1000 GB/sec for
on-demand processing single
cubes and cube groups
Bandwidth
•
SKA Pathfinder Cubes ~ 36 TB
which implies 3600 sec read time
at 10GB/sec
•
typical survey consists of ~1000
cubes = 42 days read time
•
would like 100-1000 GB/sec for
on-demand processing single
cubes and cube groups
≈500 billion Galaxies
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Data Storage
• Database Structure and Performance
• LSST project
• 1,000 Billion Objects, 1012 rows
• Map-reduce, Big table (Google),
SciDB, share-nothing open source
SQL
• SKA pathfinders ~10 million objects
• SDSS project
• Balance of compute power and query
complexity (Amdahl number) Graywulf Project
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Powering the beast
• Storage power consumption 2-5
Megawatt/Exabyte
• Computing power consumption
350 MW/Exaflop
• SKA Central Processing ~
50MW = $150 million /year
• Need GREEN solutions and
better power efficiency
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Making discoveries
•
SKA data will need world-leading (unique) processing and storage
facilities
•
These facilities will not be replicated and will need to be accessed
and used remotely
•
“Move only what you need”
•
process and query remotely and move the results - not the raw
data
Discovery fabric
• Joining of HPC, high
Long Term
Storage
performance storage
and Database
Technology = REAL
TIME Resource
• Remote query and
data discovery
• Virtual Observatory
developments and
standards are critical
High
Availability
Storage/DB
On
demand
processing
VO Services and
Query Interface
The EXA-Scale SKA Challenges
•
Gathering, storing and
processing at the EXA scale
= SPECIAL FACILITIES in the
2020s
•
Accessing and mining the
data needs new DB
approaches and the marriage
of DB, storage and HPC
•
Access from “home” means
the VO and resource
hierarchies
•
We need to do better on
powering the beasts and
become greener
Producing the current annual data
product of all mankind in one day
My thanks to the following:
• ICRAR
– Prof Peter Quinn
– Dr Chris Harris
– Prof Andreas Wicenec
– Pete Wheeler
• CSIRO
– Tim Cornwell
– Ben Humphries
• iVEC
– Guy Robinson
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Thanks for listening
• Questions
– I’m deaf (the hearing aids aren’t a fashion statement) & on the
other side of the planet
– Please speak clearly.
• Kevin.Vinsen@icrar.org
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