The South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (Sarao) announced on Thursday that the international consortium of computing specialists, which included South Africans, which had been developing the Science Data Processor (SDP) for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope project, had completed its engineering design work on the system. The consortium, led by the UK’s University of Cambridge, involved almost 40 institutions in 11 countries.
The SDP project involved the design of the computing hardware, software and algorithms required to take the enormous amounts of data that will be provided by the SKA and process it into science data products – astronomical images, in other words. The SDP would be composed of two supercomputers, one in South Africa and one in Australia.
The South African institutions involved were Sarao itself, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research’s Centre for High-Performance Computing, the University of Cape Town, and local companies Space Advisory Company (SAC) and Eclipse Holdings. Awarded funding under Sarao’s Financial Assistance Programme (FAP), SAC and Eclipse seconded a total of four engineers to the SDP consortium.