Power monitoring and control for large scale projects: SKA, a case study

Abstract

Large sensor-based science infrastructures for radio astronomy like the SKA will be among the most intensive data-driven projects in the world, facing very high demanding computation, storage, management, and above all power demands. The geographically wide distribution of the SKA and and its associated processing requirements in the form of tailored High Performance Computing (HPC) facilities, require a Greener approach towards the Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) adopted for the data processing to enable operational compliance to potentially strict power budgets. Addressing the reduction of electricity costs, improve system power monitoring and the generation and management of electricity at system level is paramount to avoid future inefficiencies and higher costs and enable fulfillments of Key Science Cases. Here we outline major characteristics and innovation approaches to address power efficiency and longterm power sustainability for radio astronomy projects, focusing on Green ICT for science and Smart power monitoring and control.

Use cases of lossy compression for floating-point data in scientific data sets

“…However, the development of new scientific instruments is facing even more severe constraints with respect to data reduction because the storage and communication systems are improving at a much lower speed than the measurement resolution and accuracy of these instruments are. This is particularly true for upgrade projects such as the Advanced Photon Source APS-U (Fornek, 2017) and the Linac Coherent Light Source II (Marcus et al, 2015) and also for other flagship projects such as the Square Kilometre Array (Domingos Barbosa, 2016) that will produce gigantic amounts of data. In the case of instruments, the data need to be reduced online while it is produced, thus representing another level of difficulty.…”

An Automated Scalable Framework for Distributing Radio Astronomy Processing Across Clusters and Clouds

“…Additionally, LOFAR is a pathfinder for the larger Square Kilometer Array (SKA) [3] radio telescope. At low frequencies, the SKA telescope is expected to increase the data rate [4] to 400TB per day creating more than 120PB per year [5].…”