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SKAO Status Update

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Samuel Twum &

Marco Bartolini, Thomas Juerges, et al

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28th May, 2024 @ 38th Tango Community Meeting

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One Observatory Two Telescopes Three Continents

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Australia

Canada

China

Germany

India

Italy

The Netherlands

Portugal

South Africa

Spain

Switzerland

United Kingdom

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SKAO is the world's second intergovernmental organisation to be dedicated to astronomy

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SKA-Low Telescope

  • 512 stations
  • 50 MHz - 350 MHz
  • Maximum distance 74 km

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Image credits: SKAO website

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SKA-Mid Telescope

  • 133 SKA 15m dishes
  • 64 MeerKAT 13.5m dishes
  • Maximum baseline 150 km
  • 350 MHz - 15.4 GHz

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Image credits: SKAO website

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Why not build one big dish?

Better resolution

Better sensitivity

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Image credits: SKAO website

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Telescope Functional Overview

Infrastructure: facilities, roads, lending strips, power, water, networks, masers, IT...

Data Archives: Observing Data, Scientific Data, Engineering Data, Project Data...

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Science Goals

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Image credits: SKAO website

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More on our website

https://www.skao.int/en/explore/

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Develop the earliest possible working demonstration of the architecture and supply chain (AA0.5).

Then maintain a continuously working and expanding facility that demonstrates the full performance capabilities of the SKA design.

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Strategy

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SKA Low

SKA Mid

Start of Construction (TO)

1 July 2021

1 July 2021

Earliest Major Construction Contracts (C0)

July 2021

July 2021

Array Assembly 0.5 Finish

Feb 2024

June 2024

Array Assembly 1 Finish

Feb 2025

Sep 2025

Array Assembly 2 Finish

Feb 2026

July 2026

Array Assembly AA* Finish

Feb 2027

June 2027

Operations Readiness Review

May 2027

August 2027

End of Construction

July 2028

July 2028

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AA 0.5 What does it do ?

Quite a lot, actually:

  • Startup and shutdown telescopes (and/or ITF/PSI equipment)
  • Integrate and verify telescope equipment
  • Reporting and tracking of issues
  • Prepare and manage observation scripts
  • Operate and monitor the telescope, enable data gathering
  • Access, inspect, and analyse astronomical and engineering data
  • Maintain telescope equipment

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Operations Update Australia

(SKA LOW)

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Murchison SKA site

AAVS3.0

(image credit: Pablo Carillo)

AAVS3.0�Operational October 2023

AAVS2.0 + AAVS3.0

(image credit Google Earth)

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Free Issue Materials

Remote Processing Facility

Start of trenching South Arm

Construction Camp

Medium Voltage Switches

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S8 Mesh

First Antenna March 7th

First Antennas on S8 April 2024

Core 2019 left�Core 2023 right

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Operations Update South Africa

(SKA MID)

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Software

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Key Software Components

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Organisation of SKA Software & Computing

  • Coordinated effort of 30 globally distributed teams
  • Guided by the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe™)
  • Software development teams are present in five Agile Release Trains (ARTs) delivering software products required for SKA construction & SRCNet ART working towards prototyping the SKA regional Centre Network
  • Content, technical and process alignment between ARTs managed by the Solution Team & ART Program Teams
  • All ARTs follow the same 3-month planning and delivery cadence → Planning Increment (PI)
  • Work shared with stakeholders through regular series of system demos

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A Snapshot of our Tech Stack

    • A standard platform for all environments
    • OCI images as main deployment mechanism
      • SKA Tango images
    • Web based user access to monitoring and control
    • Python as the preferred programming language
    • PyTango for control software development, library of base classes for common controls aspects
    • Development standards

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SKA Base Classes & Utilities

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An Emphasis on Testing

    • High degree of automation, supported by extensive infrastructure
      • Large test base
      • Hardware in the loop testing, or mocking external devices
      • Discovering subtle behaviours in the command/event execution
    • MID/LOW ITF
    • Pairwise testing
    • Specifying the behaviour of the system via tests (behaviour Driven Development) and relate BDD tests to requirements and use cases

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An Emphasis on Testing cont’d

    • Communities of practice
      • CI/CD & Testing Community of Practice
      • Tango Community of Practice

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    • Tooling to facilitate testing
      • ska-tango-test-bench: test bench for testing Tango release candidates against SKA software.
      • ska-tango-testing: provides test harness elements for testing of Tango devices.
      • ska-eda-perf-eval: simple Tango Device to test the SKA archiver EDA that is heavily based on the canonical Tango archiver HDB++

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Attracting and Retaining Talent

We are struggling to compete in the wider software industry.

How do we stay relevant?

Young graduate programs*

Opportunities at SKAO (HQ and host countries)

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High-value technical choice and partnership

Aligned with SKAO ethos towards the adoption and support of open source projects

The community is the foundation for a great product, thanks to all involved!

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