First SKA Regional Centre training gets hands on with ‘containerisation’

BY DR MARCELLA MASSARDI (INAF) AND DR MCARMEN TORIBIO (CHALMERS UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY)

The first in a series of training events has been held on the techniques and tools the SKA user community will need to do science with Observatory data via the global network of SKA Regional Centres (SRCs).

The Science User Engagement group of the SRC Steering Committee (SRCSC) organised the “Hands-on Containerisation” event from 27 January to 10 February, a fully virtual event attracting more than 260 registered participants from 27 countries, spanning a large diversity in experience and backgrounds. Around 120 attendees participated live in the training sessions, and many more downloaded presentations, Q&A sessions and tutorials, which are available on the event website.

The first session gave an overview of the SKA project and its Data Challenges, and covered the basics of software tools GitHub, GitLab, Docker and Singularity. The tutorials were tailored to be applied to the SKA Science Data Challenge 1 data, which provided useful simulations of future SKA observations before real data flows in. The second session was dedicated to advanced tutorials and further tricks to solve issues.

Both format and content were enthusiastically appreciated by the attendees, who gave positive and constructive feedback: this is being considered in the framework of the SRCSC efforts to define the community’s training and support requirements.

View the event website and recordings: https://indico.skatelescope.org/event/876/contributions

What is containerisation?

Astronomers use an abundance of different software tools and customised pipelines to analyse data, which could cause a significant maintenance burden for SRCs, and present barriers for reproducibility and Open Science. “Containers”, like Docker and Singularity, provide a way to package code and its dependencies so that anyone can easily deploy and reproduce a workflow across (and beyond) the SRC network. This method means users don’t have to worry about installation dependencies, and it protects customised pipelines from being broken by updates which may prove to be incompatible with other elements in the pipeline.