ESCAPE project looks to the future

BY CASSANDRA CAVALLARO (SKAO)

Late October 2022 saw the final in-person gathering of the ESCAPE project, bringing together data experts including members of the SKAO’s Operations team.

ESCAPE, funded under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme, facilitated collaboration between major science infrastructures which share a need to deal with massive data rates, including the SKAO, CERN, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and Cherenkov TelescopeArray Observatory (CTAO).

Hosted at the impressive Royal Belgium Museum of Natural Sciences in Brussels, the ESCAPE to the Future event was an opportunity for members to talk about the results that have been collectively achieved with a range of technologies for Big Data management and processing.

Operations Data Scientist Dr James Collinson presented SKAO results from the science platform prototyping – the software that will allow users to generate science results from their data – and talked about the benefits of being part of the ESCAPE project, many of which have fed into the SKA Regional Centre Network development started earlier in 2022.

“ESCAPE has enabled us to pool knowledge with engineers and technical leaders from all organisations involved,” said Dr Collinson. “We face similar challenges around how to efficiently process and store our data so it’s invaluable to be able to hear each others’ experiences and how different organisations are approaching these issues.”

SKAO Deputy Director of Operations Antonio Chrysostomou represented the SKAO on a panel to discuss the legacy of ESCAPE and the broader impact of such collaborations for the SKAO and other groups.

The collaboration doesn’t end here: following the meeting, nine of the core ESCAPE research infrastructure partners, including the SKAO, signed a new Open Collaboration Agreement. This is intended to cement their long-term cooperation into the future.

Materials from the meeting including recordings of the presentations are now available on the meeting website