This article attempts to explain what Compucon is doing to exploit the opportunities arising from direct involvements in the technical investigation and design of the Central Signal Processor (CSP) in the international Square Kilometre Array telescope (SKA) project.  This article is a background paper.

New Zealand Alliance

• Compucon New Zealand is an official member of the New Zealand Alliance (NZA) team that has been appointed by the SKA project organisation to investigate and design the CSP for the Survey telescope.  NZA is led by AUT and the Institute of Radio Astronomy and Space Research, and consists of scientists and engineers from Massey University, University of Auckland, and Compucon New Zealand.  NZA submitted a proposal in May 2013 to the SKA Project Office and this proposal defined how the team would do the investigation and design for SKA.  The proposal was accepted and NZA was appointed.

SKA Survey CSP

• The SKA Survey telescope, which will be located in a Western Australia desert (outside the electricity supply grid) and operational in 2020, is extremely data intensive.  The total amount of signals to be collected from the sky is as high as 7.9TB/s at any one time.  If a PC has one standard 1GbE network port with 79% utilisation capacity and consuming 300W, we would need 100,000 PC to receive the signals and consume 30,000kWHr of electricity per hour.  Once received, the CSP has to convert these signals to a form ready for human visibility in an offsite data centre in real time.  The CSP has three major tasks to resolve- channelization, cross-connect, and cross-correlation. 

Serious Engineering

• The direct engagements by Compucon have revealed that commercial off the shelf (COTS) computing equipment is unlikely to meet the challenges of CSP.  We will need more powerful and yet power humble computing equipment than we know of.  This leads the team to go back to Square One of the technology development chain and to assess from the angles of Electronics Engineering, Computer Science, and Software Engineering respectively.  Compucon contributes Systems Engineering skills to push the envelope. 

Exabyte Computing for 2020

• SKA takes place at a time when the global communities of computer scientists, technology vendors, and high performance computing users are gathering regularly to plan the path to Exabyte Computing by 2020.  Coincidentally but not surprisingly, the scope of discussion is identical to the work being done by NZA although for different purposes.  As Compucon is the only member from the industry in the New Zealand Survey CSP physical implementation planning team, Compucon is well positioned to spin off the efforts for the benefits of New Zealand.  How will New Zealand compete with the rest of the world in HPC?