Spain exploring Open Science and green computing for sustainable SRCs

BY DR JULIÁN GARRIDO (INSTITUTO DE ASTROFÍSICA DE ANDALUCÍA - CSIC)

With the aim of creating a green and sustainable SKA Regional Centre (SRC) in Spain, the European Union funding scheme NextGenerationEU, via the Spanish National Agency of Research, has awarded a €460,000 grant to the Spanish SRC group.

The team will collaborate with the Portuguese SRC, the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) in Italy, the SKAO and the South African University of Cape Town in this two-year project. The project was ranked in the top 20 of 1,670 approved proposals.

Scientific data generated by the SKA telescopes will reach exa-scale levels, requiring an international network of SKA Regional Centres (SRCs) for their scientific analysis. In 2018, it was estimated that data centres worldwide consumed 1% of the global electricity demand, so the SRC developments constitute a unique testbed for transitioning to an ecological platform, in terms of energy and reproducibility.

The awarded project will address different aspects of sustainability of the SRCs and aims to contribute to a sustainable network. Its main goals are:

a) minimisation of the environmental footprint of SRCs;

b) incorporation of a green perspective in the platforms for SKA data storage, analysis and visualisation within the SRC Network prototypes; and

c) development of Open Science technologies, supporting end-to-end research reproducibility.

“We are convinced that, as researchers, we have a responsibility to promote sustainability in scientific infrastructures and that the current science system is not sustainable unless reproducibility is improved and reinvention avoided,” says Dr Lourdes Verdes-Montenegro, senior scientific researcher at the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalucia (IAA-CSIC) and co-lead of the proposal.

Via promoting green values within the community, the SKAO, and the SRC Network, this project emphasises actions that contribute to achieving the sustainable development goals of the United Nations. This includes showing how Open Science encourages a sustainable approach to science, how it accelerates the transfer of knowledge to society and promotes equity and inclusiveness.

Grant details: “Grant TED2021-130231B-I00 funded by MCIN/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033 and by the European Union NextGenerationEU/PRTR”

The study aims to make data centres more sustainable.

Credit: IAA-CSIC