The South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (Sarao) has reported that the international consortium of computing specialists, which include South Africans and has been developing the Science Data Processor (SDP) for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope project, has completed its engineering design work on the system. The consortium, led by the UK’s University of Cambridge, involved almost 40 institutions in 11 countries.

The SDP project involved the design of the computing hardware, software and algorithms required to take the enormous amounts of data that will be provided by the SKA and process it into science data products – astronomical images, in other words. The SDP would be composed of two supercomputers, one in South Africa and one in Australia.

The South African institutions involved were Sarao itself, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research’s Centre for High-Performance Computing, the University of Cape Town, and local companies Space Advisory Company (SAC) and Eclipse Holdings. Awarded funding under Sarao’s Financial Assistance Programme (FAP), SAC and Eclipse seconded a total of four engineers to the SDP consortium.

Local researchers involved included Sarao technical lead for scientific computing Simon Ratcliffe, chosen as the SDP consortium system engineer in 2012, and Sarao system engineer Shagita Gounden, who worked full-time for the SDP consortium on the system’s control and monitoring element. Also cited by Sarao for his outstanding contribution to the project was SAC data processing system engineer Ferdl Graser, who was selected SDP consortium system engineer in 2014.

“The unique requirements for the SDP have also driven our specialists to be creative and design unique technologies that allow Sarao to contribute the economic development and commercialisation in South Africa,” highlighted Sarao MD Dr Rob Adam. Sarao and South African specialists will continue to be involved in the further development of the SDP, leading to its construction. Because the FAP has been extended, five local industry engineers will be working with three Sarao engineers as part of the international team undertaking the next phase of the project.

Apart from South Africa and the UK, the other countries involved in the SDP project are Australia, Canada, China, Germany, Malta, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal, and Spain. “It’s been a real pleasure to work with such an international team of experts, from radio astronomy [and] the high-performance computing industry,” said SKA Organisation SDP project manager Maurizio Miccolis. “We’ve worked with almost every SKA country to make this happen, which goes to show how hard what we are trying to do is.” The SKA Organisation is the international entity that has been overseeing the design of the SKA; it is now transitioning into the SKA Observatory (SKAO), created by the signing of the SKA Observatory Treaty by Australia, China, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, South Africa and the UK in March. The SKAO will oversee the construction and operation of the SKA.

“We estimate [the] SDP’s total compute power to be around 250 PFlops, or PetaFlops – that’s 25% faster than IBM’s Summit, the current fastest supercomputer in the world,” he highlighted. “In total, up to 600 PB, or Petabytes, of data will be distributed around the world every year from the SDP – that’s enough to fill more than a million average laptops.”

South Africa and Australia will cohost the core elements of the SKA telescope. South Africa will have the midfrequency element of the SKA in the Karoo region of the Northern Cape. Australia will have the low-frequency element in the Murchison region of Western Australia. The two SDP supercomputers will be located in Cape Town and Perth.