© ASTRON/IBM
Dome and SKA
Among other things, the group discussed the mapping of Dome work onto SKA design work. A preliminary design review (PDR) is planned early next year. The discussion also covered ways of contributing to the SKA beyond PDR. There was also an exchange of thoughts on fundamental aspects, such as the extent to which the physical bulk of SKA data should be kept close to the telescope or at regional science data centres.
Progress and more progress
Researchers from various work streams were happy to report significant progress. For instance, there is now a concept-design of an extremely power-efficient chip for the low-frequency aperture array (LFAA) systems. It will be included as an alternative design in the PDR documentation set. Two work streams, Novel Algorithms and Real-time Communication, have started only recently. Nevertheless, researchers were able to share some initial results, and plans for the near future. Another great example is the microserver. It is now ready for ASTRON and SKA South Africa to start implementing and testing software on it (think correlator and imaging algorithms).
The next face-to-face meeting is planned for March 2015. The picture shows the members of the Dome team in front of one of the ZRL buildings just before the final session. Inset left: Erik Vermij explaining his award-winning accelerator research. Inset right: Yan Grange reporting progress on access patterns (storage).