2019 SKA Shanghai Meeting: Concluding our Past, Realising our Future

25 Nov 2019, 08:00 → 28 Nov 2019, 21:50 Asia/Shanghai

                                

                                   The SKA System Design, Operations & Plans

The SKA community is gearing up for one of the biggest events in this year’s project’s calendar: the 2019 SKA Meeting in Shanghai.

Registration is open for the 25-28 November meeting, which will bring together hundreds of engineers, data scientists, astronomers and other experts from within the SKA community and beyond. The focus will be on the immediate and long-term future of the SKA telescopes, from procurement to commissioning and operations.

In a year of milestones for the SKA project, the Shanghai Meeting promises another. For the first time, the SKA Organisation will present the full design of the two telescopes, finally unifying the years of work carried out by the SKA’s design consortia.  This first look at the detailed elements as a cohesive whole will set the scene for the overall System Critical Design Review, taking place at SKA Global HQ just two weeks later.

“So far we’ve seen individual parts of the SKA’s design, like seeing sections of a jigsaw but not the full image,” says Tim Stevenson, SKAO Head of Mission Assurance and EOC Chair. “To see those pieces put together, the culmination of all that effort from teams around the world, will be quite momentous for all involved.”

For the past 18 months, critical design reviews have been taking place for nine of the SKA’s international engineering design consortia, each focusing on a key element of the telescopes’ design. The System CDR will ensure these individual pieces can operate as one and meet the exacting system requirements for the SKA to achieve its science goals.

“For those who may have watched the SKA’s progression from a distance, this is the point at which we can say: this is what we will build, and now is the time to get involved,” says SKA Director-General Prof. Phil Diamond. “From the engineers who will construct this amazing machine, to the data scientists who will keep it at the forefront of innovations in the field, and seasoned experts in commissioning and operating existing facilities – we want to grow our community and this meeting is the perfect opportunity to do so. I encourage all interested parties to join us in Shanghai.”

As well as the design preview and talks by colleagues at precursor, pathfinder and peer projects, there will be sessions on the latest developments towards the network of SKA Science Regional Centres (SRCs). These SRCs will be supercomputing facilities dotted around the globe that will be processing and hosting hundreds of petabytes of data, acting as the final interface with the end users, namely the scientists and astronomers.

To remind the assembled delegates, who will be mostly engineers and managers, of the true significance of their endeavours, each day will commence with a science talk, addressing major topics in the SKA’s science case, delivered by astronomers in those respective fields.

Co-hosted by the SKA Organisation and China’s Ministry of Science and Technology, the Shanghai Meeting will provide an opportunity for our Chinese partners to celebrate the significant contribution of Chinese institutions to the SKA to date. This has included leading the international Dish consortium designing the SKA-mid antennas -including the fabrication of two prototype dishes, designing the synchronisation system for SKA-low within the Signal and Data Transport consortium, and contributions towards science operations planning.

Attendees will have the chance to visit China’s flagship radio astronomy project, the Five-hundred metre Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), which is the world’s largest filled aperture radio telescope. This mega-science endeavour, constructed in just five years in a natural basin in China’s southwest Guizhou province, can offer numerous lessons for the SKA as it heads into procurement and construction.

All are welcome to attend the meeting, and further information on how to register can be found at the following link: https://indico.skatelescope.org/event/551/registrations/

Presentations, or Posters of experience and lessons learned from SKA Precursor, Pathfinder and sister projects are invited for the following sessions:

Radio Telescope Commissioning
Radio Observatory Engineering Operations
Radio Observatory Science Operations

Presentation length will be determined based on the abstract and contributors suggestions, and will be notified upon selection.

To submit an abstract for consideration under these topics, please use the "Submit new abstract" button below.

Monday 25th

• 1. Shanghai Meeting Welcome - Phil Diamond.pdf
• 2. Scene Setting - Joe McMullin.pdf
• 3. System Design Baseline PEP - Joe McMullin.pdf
• 4. System Eng approach - Marco Caiazzo.pdf
• 5. DBD overview - Luca Stringhetti.pdf
• 6. SKA1-Low - Maria Grazia Labate.pdf
• 7. SKA1-Mid Telescope Design - Gerhard Swart.pdf
• 8. Software - Nick Rees.pdf
• 9. AIV and Protoypes - Luca Stringhetti.pdf

Tuesday 26th - Part 1

• 1. MWA Science - Mia Walker.pdf
• 2. Signal Chain Presentation - Bassem Alackhar.pdf
• 3. Cal System - Robert Laing.pdf
• 4. SAFe Status - Nick Rees.pdf
• 6. MeerKAT Extension Overview - Gundolf Weiching.pdf
• 7. SRCSC Update - Peter. Quinn.pdf
• 8. Science Commissioning - Robert Laing.pdf
• 9. Planning the Verification of the SKA1 Telescopes - Richard Lord.pdf

Tuesday 26th - Part 2

• 11. Tianlai Update - Fengquan Wu.pdf
• 12. ASKAP Commissioning - Aidan Hotan.pdf
• 13. Commissiong and Science Verification MeerKAT - Simon Ratcliffe.pdf
• 14. Commissioning the VLA and EVLA - Rick Perley.pdf
• 15. MWA Commissiong - Randall Wayth.pdf
• 16. Experiences From Commissioning Digital Receivers - Prabu Thiagaraj.pdf

Wednesday 27th - Part 1

• 3. SKA Logistic Modelling - Andreas van Zyl.pdf
• 4. JVLA Engineering Operations - Peggy Perley.pdf
• 5. Controls to Manage RFI in a Radio Astronomy Environment - Richard Lord.pdf
• 6. SKA-VLBI Capacity and Technique - Cristina Garcia Miro.pdf
• 7. MeerKAT Status Integration Verification and Lessons - Thomas Abbott.pdf
• 8. MWA Operations - Melanie Johnston-Hollitt.pdf
• 9. LOFAR - RF Pizzo.pdf

Wednesday 27th - Part 2

• 10. Traceability - Rubert Spann.pdf
• 11. Science Operations for VLA and VLBA - Bryan Butler.pdf
• 13. HI Intensity Mapping with MeerKAT - LI Yi-Chao.pdf
• 14. The Feed Indexer lessons learnt - Rentato Aurigemma.pdf
• 15. The Measurements and Calibrations for Large Radio Telescope - Jinqing Wang.pdf

Monday, 25 November

08:00 → 09:00 Registration

09:00 → 09:30 Welcome

Speakers:
Ministry of Science and Technology - Vice Minister WANG Xi
Square Kilometre Array Organisation - Director-General Philip Diamond
Chinese Academy of Sciences - GAO Hongjun
Honorary Director of Shanghai Observatory, Academician - YE Shuhua
Shanghai City Government - (Vice Mayor WU Qing)

09:30 → 10:00 Welcome: Introduction to 2019 SKA Shanghai Meeting

Speakers:
Ministry of Science and Technology - Vice Minister WANG Xi
Square Kilometre Array Organisation - Director-General Philip Diamond
Chinese Academy of Sciences - GAO Hongjun
Honorary Director of Shanghai Observatory, Academician - YE Shuhua
Shanghai City Government - (Vice Mayor WU Qing)

Convener: Prof. Philip Diamond (SKA Organisation)

10:00 → 11:00 Group Photo + Coffee

11:00 → 11:30 Welcome: Scene Setting - Design, Plans and Ops

Speakers:
Ministry of Science and Technology - Vice Minister WANG Xi
Square Kilometre Array Organisation - Director-General Philip Diamond
Chinese Academy of Sciences - GAO Hongjun
Honorary Director of Shanghai Observatory, Academician - YE Shuhua
Shanghai City Government - (Vice Mayor WU Qing)

Convener: Dr Joseph McMullin (SKA Organisation)

11:30 → 12:15 System Design Baseline: System Design Baseline - Summary of PEP

Summary of PEP - Joe McMullin
System Engineering Approach - Marco Caiazzo

Convener: Joseph McMullin (SKA Organisation)

12:15 → 12:30 System Design Baseline: System Engineering Approach

Summary of PEP - Joe McMullin
System Engineering Approach - Marco Caiazzo

Convener: Marco Caiazzo (SKAO)

12:30 → 13:30 Lunch

13:30 → 14:00 System Design Baseline: DBD Overview

Summary of PEP - Joe McMullin
System Engineering Approach - Marco Caiazzo

Convener: Luca Stringhetti (SKA Organisation)

14:00 → 14:30 System Design Baseline: LOW specific Design

Summary of PEP - Joe McMullin
System Engineering Approach - Marco Caiazzo

Convener: Maria Grazia Labate (SKA Organisation)

14:30 → 15:00 System Design Baseline: MID specific Design

Summary of PEP - Joe McMullin
System Engineering Approach - Marco Caiazzo

Convener: Gerhard Swart (SKAO)

15:00 → 15:30 Coffee

15:30 → 16:30 System Design Baseline: M&C, SDP, PSS, PST

Summary of PEP - Joe McMullin
System Engineering Approach - Marco Caiazzo

Convener: Nicholas Rees (SKA Organisation)

16:30 → 17:00 System Design Baseline: AIV and Prototypes

Summary of PEP - Joe McMullin
System Engineering Approach - Marco Caiazzo

Convener: Luca Stringhetti (SKA Organisation)

Tuesday, 26 November

09:00 → 09:30 Science Warm Up: MWA

Convener: Mia Walker (Curtin University)

09:30 → 10:30 System Design Baseline: Signal Chain performance

Summary of PEP - Joe McMullin
System Engineering Approach - Marco Caiazzo

Convener: Bassem Alachkar (University of Manchester)

10:30 → 11:00 System Design Baseline: Systemic errors and calibration

Summary of PEP - Joe McMullin
System Engineering Approach - Marco Caiazzo

Convener: Robert Laing (Square Kilometre Array Organisation)

11:00 → 11:30 Coffee

11:30 → 11:45 System Design Baseline: SAFE and SW status

Summary of PEP - Joe McMullin
System Engineering Approach - Marco Caiazzo

Convener: Nicholas Rees (SKA Organisation)

11:45 → 12:00 System Design Baseline: Conclusions and way forward

Summary of PEP - Joe McMullin
System Engineering Approach - Marco Caiazzo

Convener: Joseph McMullin (SKA Organisation)

12:00 → 12:30 MeerKAT Extension

Convener: Gundolf Wieching (MPIfR)

12:30 → 13:00 SKA Regional Centres (session): SRCSC white paper

Convener: Peter Quinn (ICRAR)

Peter Quinn SRCSC Board Update 19112019v2.pdf

13:00 → 14:00 Lunch

14:00 → 14:40 Commissioning and Science Verification

Convener: Robert Laing (Square Kilometre Array Organisation)

14:40 → 15:00 Commissioning and Science Verification: Planning the Verification of the SKA1 Telescopes

Convener: Richard Lord (SKA SA)

15:00 → 15:15 Commissioning and Science Verification: VLBI as a commissioning tool

Convener: Harro Verkouter (Joint Institute for VLBI - ERIC)

15:15 → 15:30 Commissioning and Science Verification: Tianlai -- Interferometer pathfinder array

Convener: Dr Fengquan Wu (National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences)

15:30 → 16:00 Coffee

16:00 → 16:25 Commissioning and Science Verification: ASKAP

Convener: Aidan Hotan (CSIRO)

16:25 → 16:50 Commissioning and Science Verification: MeerKAT

Conveners: adriaan peens-hough (ska south africa), Richard Lord (SKA SA)

16:50 → 17:15 Commissioning and Science Verification: Commissioning the Very Large Array and the Jansky Very Large Array

Convener: Richard Perley (National Radio Astronomy Observatory)

17:15 → 17:35 Commissioning and Science Verification: MWA Commissioning

Convener: Randall Wayth (Curtin University, ICRAR)

17:35 → 17:55 Commissioning and Science Verification: Experiences from Commissioning the Murchison Widefield Array Digital Receivers

Convener: Prabu Thiagaraj (RRI)

Wednesday, 27 November

09:00 → 09:30 Science Warm Up: MeerKAT

Convener: Justin Jonas (Rhodes University)

09:30 → 10:10 Operations: SKA Operations Plan

Convener: Antonio Chrysostomou (SKA)

10:10 → 10:30 Operations: SKA Logistics Modelling

Convener: Mr Andreas van Zyl (SKA Organisation)

10:30 → 11:00 Operations: VLA Operations

Convener: Dr Peggy Perley (NRAO)

11:00 → 11:30 Coffee

11:30 → 11:50 Operations: Controls to Manage Radio Frequency Interference in a Radio Astronomy Environment

Convener: Abraham Johannes Otto (SKA-SA)

11:50 → 12:10 Operations: SKA-VLBI capacity and technique

Convener: Mrs Cristina Garcia Miro (SKAO)

12:10 → 12:30 Operations: MeerKAT engineering update and lessons from integration

Convener: Thomas Abbott (SKA SA)

12:30 → 13:30 Lunch

13:30 → 13:50 Operations: MWA Operations

Convener: Melanie Johnston-Hollitt (Peripety Scientific Ltd)

13:50 → 14:10 Operations: The Low Frequency Array (LOFAR): Operational Challenges and Lessons Learned

Convener: Carole Jackson (ASTRON)

14:10 → 14:30 Operations: Traceability equals more up time - speeding up problem solving

Convener: Rupert Spann (SARAO)

14:30 → 15:00 Operations: Science Operations for the VLA & VLBA; Application to SKA

Convener: Bryan Butler (NRAO)

15:00 → 15:30 Coffee

15:30 → 15:50 Operations: A day in the life of MeerKAT Operations

Convener: Lindsay Magnus (SKA SA)

15:50 → 16:10 Operations: HI Intensity mapping with MeerKAT and 1/f noise analysis

Convener: Yi-Chao Li (UWC)

16:10 → 16:30 Operations: The "feed indexer": lesson learnt and facilities for testing and commissioning

Convener: Renato Aurigemma (SAM-Società Aerospaziale Mediterranea)

16:30 → 16:50 Operations: The Measurements and Calibrations for Radio Telescope

Convener: Jinqing Wang

Thursday, 28 November

09:00 → 09:30 Science Warm Up: ASKAP

Convener: Aidan Hotan (CSIRO)

09:00 → 11:00 Splinter Sessions: AIP/SODP

Convener: Carole Jackson (ASTRON)

09:00 Showcasing what has been done…

Speaker: Carole Jackson (ASTRON)

09:30 WBSPF/ASPFR Update

Speaker: Gary Hovey (National Research Council)

09:45 PAF Update

Speaker: Steve Barker (CSIRO)

10:00 MFAA Update

Speaker: rui cao (KLAASA)

10:15 Bluering

Speaker: Grant Hampson (CSIRO)

10:30 Smart Front Ends

Speaker: Mark Bentum (ASTRON)

10:45 High energy-efficiency signal processing technology for MFAA

Speaker: rui cao (KLAASA)

09:30 → 11:00 Splinter Sessions: Operations Workshop

Convener: Lewis Ball (SKA)

11:00 → 11:30 Coffee

11:30 → 13:00 Operations: Splinter Sessions: Operations Workshop

Convener: Lewis Ball (SKA)

11:30 → 13:00 Splinter Sessions: AIP/SODP

Convener: Carole Jackson (ASTRON)

11:30 Design of Extremely Low Noise Amplifier with GaAs HEMTs for SKA Band 2 Receiver

Speaker: Frank Jiang (NRC-Herzberg)

11:45 VLBI with White Rabbit Time and Frequency Distribution

Speaker: Paul Boven (JIVE)

12:00 Integrated dissemination system of frequency, time and data for radio astronomy

Speaker: Bo Wang (Tsinghua university)

12:15 Aperture Array Integrated Receiver

Speaker: Sangitiana RAKOTOZAFY HARISON (Observatoire de Paris / Station de Radiastronomie de Nançay)

12:30 Some Viewpoints of Reliability and Security Challenges of SDHP

Speaker: Yuan Luo (Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China)

12:45 Experience Learned from Initial Scale-Out Prototyping Efforts

Speaker: Yongxin Zhu (Chinese Academy of Sciences/Shanghai Jiao Tong University)

scale-out experience talk Yongxin.pdf

13:00 → 14:00 Lunch

13:45 → 16:00 SKA Regional Centres (session): Splinter Session - SRC

Convener: Rosie Bolton (SKAO)

Peter Quinn SRCSC Board Update 19112019v2.pdf

13:45 Australian SRC Design Study Program

I will provide an overview of the Australian SRC Design Study Program. The program funded by the Australian Government and CSIRO brings together the key partners - CSIRO, ICRAR and Pawsey. In the upcoming 3 years the program will focus on assisting several pilot SKA precursor science projects (ASKAP and MWA) with their software, compute and data needs, as well as working on the SRC system prototyping as part of regional and international collaborative SRC effort.

Speaker: Slava Kitaeff (UWA-CSIRO)

14:04 SRC Data Storage Pilot

Provisioning long-term storage capacity will be a core function of SKA regional centres (SRCs). Commercial Cloud storage accumulates significant costs over time and typical HPC processing scenarios require moving the data products elsewhere for preservation. The same applies to the storage of large test and simulation data sets, which is of immediate interest prior to SKA construction. Later, during the operational phase, Observatory Data Products (ODPs) and derived Advanced Data Products (ADPs) will be made available through SRCs only.

The new compute cluster and storage pilot at SHAO provides an opportunity to work with a prospective SRC facility already during the SKA design phase. We will report on an example workflow implemented by ICRAR and originally deployed on the currently most powerful supercomputer Summit at ORNL. It is now redeployed at SHAO for more general use and features a large-scale imaging pipeline, starting from the generation of simulated visibilities all the way to the analysis of an image cube.

Speaker: Markus Dolensky (ICRAR)

src-storage-pilot.pdf

14:23 Scientific reproducibility in the Spanish SKA Regional Centre prototype

The SKA Regional Centres (SRCs) will be at the core of the exploitation of SKA data, being the place where the science will be done and hence should constitute a collaborative framework where researchers can share their experiments. At the IAA-CSIC we are leading the Spanish effort to host an SRC. We are developing a prototype with a special focus on addressing the challenge of handling SKA data to extract scientific knowledge in a reproducible way (i.e. following the Scientific Method). Currently, the Open Science initiative is encouraging the development of new solutions to enhance knowledge sharing and collaboration as well as to ensure transparency, as basic factors to achieve scientific reproducibility. Our objective is therefore that Big Data science becomes Open Science in the SRCs. In this talk, we will present the activities that we have carried out so far to develop the IAA-CSIC SRC prototype fully aligned with the Open Science Principles.

Speaker: Susana Sánchez Expósito (IAA-CSIC)

Shanghai_SSanchez_IAA_protoSRC_reproducibility.pdf

14:42 China SKA Regional Centre Prototyping

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is the largest radio telescope to be built by astronomers. The key factor that promotes the SKA to achieve milestones in science frontier research is the capability of properly processing the SKA data and converting the data to scientific products. SKA Observatory (SKAO) will only produces pre-calibrated data which are not science-ready for publication. Instead, in-depth data analysis and astronomical software development will be performed in a number of geographically distributed SKA Regional Centres (SRCs) which also provide long-term data archive storage, computing resource and technique support for the SKA users. As the starting of the SKA Phase I (SKA1) is approaching, the focus of SRCs is in a transition from design to implementation. The SRC prototyping includes construction of multiple proto-SRCs, understanding the data challenge, resource estimate with inputs from the science user forum. China SKA Regional Centre (CSRC) is one of the important components of the global SRC network, and also one of the prominent contribution from the China SKA team. Chinese scientists are actively involved in the software development and analysis of the SKA pathfinder data which are crucial for operating CSRC in an efficient manner. CSRC will also be expanded its capacity to serve East Asia regional users, and gradually develops into one of the major SRCs in the world, making profound contribution to the entire SKA community. Shanghai Astronomical Observatory is leading the preparation of the CSRC prototyping work. A CSRC prototype has been built under the financial support from the Ministry of Science and Technology of China and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Shanghai municipality expresses her strong desire to host the China SKA Regional Centre. CSRC will be an integrated organisation of domestic and international resource, including the participation of the astronomer community in SKA science and technique, computing and data storage resource in industries, educational resource in universities. In this talk, I will present the progress and plan of China SKA Regional Centre.

Speaker: Prof. Tao An (Shanghai Astronomical Observatory)

15:01 CADC, CANFAR and a Canadian SRC

This talk will present the CADC's current activities related to the development of science platform infrastructure, open software and data sharing standards in astronomy (image cutouts, VO services, interactive work sessions, batch processing, data models, user database services, etc.). These activities are directly influenced by and in support of our participation in the CIRADA project and are informing our understanding of what an SKA Regional Centre should look like. It will also present Canada's current expectations around how an SKA Regional Centre fits into the broader picture of data science in Canadian astronomy.

Speaker: Séverin Gaudet (National Research Council Canada)

2019-11_SRC_CADC_CANFAR.pptx

15:20 Compute & Storage requirements for SKA Regional Centres

The Horizon 2020 AENEAS project was formed to develop a science-driven functional design for a distributed federated European SKA Regional Centre. Here I will present some of the technical assessment work from the AENEAS project sizing the compute and storage requirements for the European SRC. This exercise used a ground-up approach to determine the volume of both primary and secondary data products that would need to be archived by an SRC, as well as the processing load incurred by the high priority science objectives of the SKA project.

Speaker: Prof. Anna Scaife (University of Manchester)

15:39 Plans and Progress towards an Indian SRC

India is one of the countries that will potentially host an SKA regional centre . In preparation to hosting a full fledged SRC, we have proposed to develop a prototype SRC during 2019-2023. This prototype will contain sufficient storage and compute to meet the requirements of processing data from the uGMRT, an SKA pathfinder telescope. I will describe ongoing efforts at developing an end to end continuum processing pipeline for archival GMRT data obtained with two different backends. I will describe our choices for the software stack and our efforts at automatic all aspects of the data processing.

Speaker: Prof. Yogesh Wadadekar (NCRA)

Yogesh_Wadadekar_indian_src.pdf

14:00 → 16:00 Splinter Sessions: AIP/SODP

Convener: Carole Jackson (ASTRON)

14:00 Framing the SODP

Speaker: Philip Diamond (SKA Organisation)

14:20 Accommodating science beyond the SKA1 design

Speaker: Robert Braun (SKA Organisation)

14:40 Panel Discussion on the AIP

Reframing AIP to a realistic and visible program to the SKA council and science community – how can we do this together?

How do we do the above and cohere with other major array developments – ngVLA, DS1000 etc…

Speakers: Gary Hovey (National Research Council), Mark Bowen (CSIRO), Steve Barker (CSIRO)

14:00 → 16:00 Splinter Sessions: China Staff Briefing

Convener: Qiming Wang (SKA Organisation)

14:30 → 16:00 Aspects of Procurement

Conveners: Andrea Casson (SKA Organisation), Tim Stevenson (SKA Office)

14:30 Procurement in the SKA - Background

Speaker: Tim Stevenson (SKA Office)

15:00 Contract structure and WBS

Speaker: Andrea Casson (SKA Organisation)

15:20 Q&A

16:00 → 16:30 Coffee

16:30 → 17:00 Splinter Sessions: AIP/SODP

Convener: Carole Jackson (ASTRON)

16:30 → 17:00 Summing up and Conclusion

Convener: Philip Diamond (SKA Organisation)