The talk can be dowloaded from Tim Cornwell's home page.

Abstract

The Square Kilometre Array Project is an international collaboration to build a new radio telescope offering many orders of magnitude improvement over existing telescopes in survey speed. Australia is one of the two sites (the other is South Africa) shortlisted to host the SKA.

By 2020, SKA will be operational, consuming some large fraction of an Exaflop to process the data into scientific results. Thus the SKA computing system will be one of the very top of the Top 500 supercomputers. Scaling "Mount Exaflop" can only be done a step at a time, starting in the lowlands. For us, this is the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder now being constructed at Boolardy in Western Australia. This 1% pathfinder, operational in 2013, has a number of technical challenges, including the development of phased array feeds for astronomy, the provision of 100 TeraFlop computing at reasonable capital and operational cost, and the development of a computing infrastructure capable of supporting the full potential of the telescope.

Bringing SKA to Australia will depend upon many factors. High amongst those will be a strong and vibrant eResearch community and capability. I will discuss the challenges of SKA in this light.

About this speaker

Tim Cornwell has a PhD (1980) from the University of Manchester in England where he worked on image processing algorithms for radio synthesis telescopes. His first significant contribution was the development of the self-calibration algorithm widely used in radio astronomy. In 1980, he moved to Socorro, New Mexico to work on the newly completed Very Large Array telescope run by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. Over the 25 years at the NRAO, he made many contributions to radio astronomical techniques, including the key algorithms needed for wide fields of view. He also contributed in the areas of telescope design (for the Atacama Large Millimeter Array), telescope commissioning (the Very Long Baseline Array), observatory management, and software development. In 2004, he joined the Square Kilometre Array International Engineering Working Group, primarily to contribute towards computing and algorithms. In 2005, he moved to Australia to take the lead role in computing for the Australia SKA Pathfinder.