South African e-Infrastructure supports international collaborative astronomy research

Southern African scientists and engineers are highly active in the astrophysics arena. Most recently, South Africa helped to design and build the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) at Sutherland, in the Northern Cape Province. This is the largest single optical telescope in the southern hemisphere, with a hexagonal mirror array of 11 metres. The High Energy Stereoscopic System (HESS) gamma ray radioscope, located in southern Namibia, is also a proud showcase of fruitful collaboration between South African, Namibian, German and other European scientists and engineers.

The Square Kilometre Array: preparations underway
With a strong commitment from the South African government, South Africa is making good headway in the preparation phase towards hosting one of the most exciting scientific endeavours in the recent years: the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project. The first phase, a one-dish prototype, has already been constructed at the Hartebeesthoek Radio Astronomy Observatory (HartRAO) in Gauteng and a seven-dish engineering test-bed, to be built near Carnarvon in the Northern Cape Province, will be commissioned towards the end of 2009. South Africa’s commitment to the success of the SKA project is further highlighted by the initiation of the MeerKAT frontier project, which aims to implement an array of more than eighty 12-metre-diameter dishes to enable test-bed technology that will be required for the SKA. These dishes are situated in the Karoo region of the Northern Cape Province and are due to be fully operational by 2012.

The world’s largest telescope
South Africa and Australia are the two remaining countries in the bid to host the SKA. With a proposed budget of €1.5 billion, the SKA project plans to simulate a giant radio telescope that is capable of extremely high sensitivity and angular resolution. By gathering the signals received from thousands of small antennae that cover a receiving area of up to one million square metres, this gigantic telescope will be 50 times more sensitive than any other radio instrument to date. The antennae will utilise a wide range of frequencies, thus permitting many independent observations at one time. As a result of these impressive features, the SKA will be able to survey the sky at a rate more than 10,000 times faster than ever before.

Meeting an unprecedented data challenge
The SKA telescope will be able to probe previously unexplored parts of the distant universe. In doing this, it is expected to generate an immense volume of data streaming: between 70 and 100 terabytes per second. A large e-Infrastructure will be needed to manage this potentially overwhelming data volume and still permit seamless remote operations from both regional researchers and global partners. This should include high capacity data transport networks, large volume data repositories and superior high-end computing capacity. To ensure both the short and long-term success of this undertaking, South Africa’s Department of Science and Technology (DST) has already implemented two important elements of the e-Infrastructure, both hosted by the Meraka Institute of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR).

The first, the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC), will be host to cutting-edge computational platforms of more than 45 Teraflops/s capacity by the end of April 2009. The second is the South African National Research Network (SANReN), a 10 Gigabits per second (10 Gb/s) ring network designed to provide a very high capacity Next Generation Network to the research community in South Africa, and later to SADC and the rest of Africa. A third and complementary element of the e-Infrastructure is the Very Large Data Repository initiative, proposed by the DST and currently undergoing rapid formulation.