First byte: Poznan joins the LOFAR Long-Term Archive

© PNSC

For most of our followers, it is not a surprise that Poland recently joined the LOFAR family with three stations. A fact much less emphasised is that as a part of this collaboration, the Poznan supercompute centre (also know as the PSNC) joined the illustrious group of institutes hosting a part of the LOFAR Long-Term Archive.

During the last working days of December 2015 and the first months of 2016, both ASTRON and PSNC worked hard to ensure that the infrastructure would be in place for production use. This culminated in the first production ingest on 11th March 2016. We look forward to continuing the collaboration with our Polish partners in the future.

The image shows the tape library used by the PSNC to store the LOFAR data.

As telescope builders, we are used to celebrating first-light events. With our increased ambitions in astronomy data management, we should also get used to celebrate first-byte.

This achievement has been a group effort. We owe our gratitude to many. The following people were most involved (in no particular order):

Gracjan Jankowski (PSNC)

Maciej Brzezniak (PSNC)

Slawomir Zdanowski (PSNC)

Ron Trompert (SurfSARA)

Cristina Manzano (FZJ)

Olaf Wucknitz (FZJ)

Jorrit Schaap (ASTRON)

Yan Grange (ASTRON)

Hanno Holties (ASTRON)

Science support (ASTRON)