SKA Science Data Centres: A Platform for Global Astronomy

M. Wise:
The SKA is an ambitious project to construct one the world’s more powerful radio telescopes and enable transformational science across a wide range of research areas. Based on current projections, the SKA Observatory, once operational, is expected to produce an archive of standard data products with a growth rate on the order of 300 petabytes per year. Although the challenges associated with populating and maintaining the SKA science archive are already impressive, these data products actually represent only the first part of the full science extraction chain. Any further processing and subsequent science extraction by users will require significant, additional computing and storage resources in the form of a global network of SKA Regional Centres. In this presentation, I will give a brief overview of the SKA itself and describe the global effort underway to design and establish this network of SKA Regional Centres. I will describe some of the boundary conditions and challenges that must be overcome in order to establish this network of SRCs. Finally, I will conclude by describing a number of efforts underway to establish a precursor Science Data Centre using current facilities.
I. Bird:
Over the next 10 years both SKA and the LHC experiments at CERN will likely generate scientific data at the Exabyte scale.  This talk will describe what has been put in place for LHC, and the possible synergies between SKA and LHC over the coming years.  A collaboration agreement has recently been signed between CERN and the SKA Organisation to explore these commonalities.  Both of these are global scientific collaborations and in many countries, will necessarily make use of the same computing infrastructures.  The talk will describe some of the aspects of the collaboration and some of the ideas being discussed for the future data analysis environments.