The Spanish SRC prototype: Supporting the community beyond radio astronomy

The IAA-CSIC, the institution that coordinates the scientific and technological SKA activities in Spain, organised SOMACHINE 2020 last November, a school on Machine Learning, Big Data, and Deep Learning in Astronomy co-organised by the Severo Ochoa Excellence Programme at the IAA-CSIC (SO-IAA) and the Andalucía Research Institute on Data Science and Computational Intelligence.

IAA-CSIC is also currently developing the Spanish Prototype of an SKA Regional Centre (SPSRC)*. Being a transversal facility, the SPSRC has provided resources and support to the training activities in SOMACHINE 2020.

The SPSRC is preparing its infrastructure to develop scientific programmes using innovative computing platforms, advanced data processing techniques and services to share data and tools. With this aim, the team deployed a cloud-based system (OpenStack) to provide a variety of services. In particular, a JupyterHub server (a web-based interactive computing platform) was set up where users can run research software using notebooks, an environment that improves code sharing. Thanks to its interactive and friendly interface, this is an excellent training tool and was hence offered to SOMACHINE 2020.

The school combined lectures, including talks on the SKA, and practical hands-on sessions on advanced processing techniques like the ones needed to extract SKA science. The participants had access to the SPSRC platform where they could execute and experiment with the tutorials in real time. The JupyterHub deployment at the SPSRC contained all the software and computational resources required to run the sessions from any web browser regardless of the participants computer and requiring no software installation. The SPSRC team collaborated with the school organisers to publish a repository in GitHub (a web platform for software hosting) containing the materials and instructions to prepare the environment to run the tutorials. Documentation and support were provided so the event could run smoothly.

Fifty participants from several countries attended the school. During the school, 181 clones (i.e. downloads) of the repository were registered and the supporting web pages in GitHub received 1523 views from 106 people.

Given the impact and oversubscription of the event, the SPSRC will support the next SOMACHINE edition in April, contributing to train the next generation of SKA researchers.

*The SPSRC is funded by the SO-IAA programme and additional competitive calls issued by the Junta de Andalucía and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, as well as CSIC, IAA’s home institution.

By the Spanish SRC prototype team (Institute of Astrophysics of Andalucía IAA-CSIC)

Assembly of the hardware used to support the training event SOMACHINE 2020, with the event’s banner superimposed on top.

SPSRC team/SOMACHINE 2020.