Performance Engineering for the SKA telescope

I gave a keynote at ICPE 2018 in Berlin about performance aspects in computing for the SKA telescope. The slides were posted here and the local copy is here.

Abstract

The SKA radio telescope will be a massive world class scientific instrument, currently under design by a world wide consortium, to progress to full operation in South Africa and Australia in the mid 2020’s. The capabilities of the telescope are expected to enable major scientific breakthroughs. At the center of its data processing sits the Science Data Processor, a large HPC system with specialized software. In this lecture we will give a high level overview of the project and progress to the computing and data related architecture. Then we will discuss the work of the SDP design consortium to understand and achieve the many performance requirements leveraging hardware and algorithms. Among these is a requirement for memory bandwidth exceeding 100 PB/sec.