ASTRON Hackathon

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Clik here to view.© Cees Bassa

We are entering a new era of astronomy with the massive radio telescope, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), coming online in next five years. The SKA will generate around 160 TB (10^12 bytes) of data per second, which is more than 5 times the current global internet traffic.

Such an immense data rate presents unparalleled challenges to astronomical and information technology communities in terms of data storage, transport, exploration, and accessibility. Amruta Jaodand (ASTRON/API) and Joe Callingham (ASTRON) organised a two-day hackathon (23-24th of April) to bring together academia and industry to address some of these challenges.

Over the corse of the hackathon, projects were developed in using machine learning to classify galaxies, using Google Cloud Platform to simulate distributed processing of large data sets, production of industry standards of test vectors for large data sets, and parallelisation of code to speed up data processing.