Square Kilometer Array (SKA)

SKA

The Square Kilometer Array (SKA) project is an international effort to build the world’s largest radio telescope, with eventually over a square kilometer (one million square meters) of collecting area. About thousands of dishes and up to a million low frequency antennas of the SKA will enable astronomers to monitor the sky in unprecedented detail and speed. The SKA will largely exceed the image resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope, while mapping huge areas of the sky with unprecedented sensitivity.

The SKA will be at the forefront of transformational science by looking at the cosmic down, the very first stars and galaxies, the nature of dark matter and dark energy, the cosmic magnetism, and more.

The SKA will generate 10 times the data trafficked across the global Internet daily and only a tiny fraction can be stored in long term archives. Extracting the relevant astronomical information out of huge data streams has to be done nearly in real-time. Hence, the SKA’s computing requires next-generation big data challenges.

Around 100 organizations across about 20 countries are participating in the design and development of the SKA. The IPM also contributes in the preparatory studies as well as in the science data challenges.

More info about the SKA: skatelescope.org

Link to the first data challenge: Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences

IPM staff involved: F. S. Tabatabaei, H. Khosroshahi