Processing Full-Scale Square Kilometre Array Data on the Summit Supercomputer

Authors: Ruonan Wang (Oak Ridge National Laboratory); Rodrigo Tobar and Markus Dolensky (University of Western Australia; International Center for Radio Astronomy Research, Australia); Tao An (Shanghai Astronomical Observatory); Andreas Wicenec and Chen Wu (University of Western Australia; International Center for Radio Astronomy Research, Australia); Fred Dulwich (University of Oxford); Norbert Podhorszki, Valentine Anantharaj, and Eric Suchyta (Oak Ridge National Laboratory); Baoqiang Lao (Shanghai Astronomical Observatory); and Scott Klasky (Oak Ridge National Laboratory)

Abstract: This work presents a workflow for simulating and processing the full-scale low-frequency telescope data of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Phase 1. The SKA project will enter the construction phase soon, and once completed, will be the world’s largest radio telescope and one of the world’s largest data generators. The authors used Summit to mimic an end-to-end SKA workflow, simulating a typical 6 hour observation and then processing the output dataset with an imaging pipeline. This workflow was deployed and run on 4,560 compute nodes, and used 27,360 GPUs to generate 2.6 PB of data. This was the first time that radio astronomical data were processed at this scale. Results show that the workflow has the capability to process one of the key SKA science cases, an Epoch of Reionization observation. This analysis helps reveal critical design factors for the next-generation radio telescopes and the required dedicated processing facilities.




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