Experts gather for exploratory workshop on SRC computing technology

BY DR DOMINGOS BARBOSA (INSTITUTO DE TELECOMUNICAÇÕES, PORTUGAL)

The SKA Regional Centres (SRCs) will store, process and provide access to the SKA telescopes’ data for astronomers around the globe, and work to establish this network of supercomputing centres is accelerating.

In March, the SRC Working Groups organised the two-day Workshop on Native Cloud Computing and Software Defined Clusters at Instituto de Telecomunicações in Aveiro, Portugal. This followed a first meeting at INAF in Bologna in 2021 on HPC infrastructure.

The Aveiro workshop involved lively discussion and presentations that included views from academia, industry (including SMEs like StackHPC, ATLAR, Critical SW), global service providers like Amazon, Google, Microsoft Azure, equipment solution leaders like DDN, Dell, Nvidia and several others.

These meetings provide the technical background information to enable design decisions by the teams involved in the development of the SRC network around the globe. They enable discussion on the technical readiness of advanced solutions, technology roadmaps, and pave the ground for choosing the architecture features that are required for a federated SRC network.

NEW SRC PROTOTYPING WORK KICKS OFF

Prototyping work for the SRC Network is now under way, with coordination from the SKAO bringing together around 50 experts based all over the world, working together in Agile teams. This effort, focused on prototyping the technologies needed to help SRCs work in federation, is being carried out under the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) as a new “Agile Release Train”, which enables packages of work to be delivered, tested and delivered incrementally.

An update from the team will be featured in the next issue of Contact!