Abstract
Abstract Astronomy is entering an era of mega-data that will render conventional research methods as well as data and visual analytics tools ineffective. The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) drives one of the most significant big data challenges of the next decades. South Africa, China and India are partners in the global SKA collaboration and host recently completed, next generation radio astronomy facilities. South Africa, Brazil, China and India are involved in the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), which represents a complementary mega-data challenge, vastly increasing the current data volume of optical surveys, and providing critical multi-wavelength data set for SKA analytics. Russian researchers are also engaged in radio astronomy and multi-wavelength, multi-messenger projects driving increasing volumes of observational data. This project brings together teams leading programs in data innovation in each partner country to collaborate on the development of new technologies and systems to meet the big data challenge of SKA pathfinder facilities and the multi-wavelength projects that are critical to the advance of astronomy. In so doing we will prototype and demonstrate scalable big data technologies for the new big data era, and establish a BRICS multinational federated data intensive cloud network for collaborative programs in data intensive astronomy.
Highlights
Modern science faces several challenges that are transformative in how science operates and in how innovations and new knowledge are generated and exploited
The challenges are (i) Big Data, how to record, transport and deliver it, (ii) Big Compute, how to process, analyse, and visualise big data, (iii) Big Science; by asking big questions as a global community facilitated by a suite of unique international facilities, science can only progress in leaps through large international collaborations, and (iv) Human Capacity Development; to make sure all people are active participants in the scientific endeavour, and that leadership in science worldwide is inclusively distributed across the globe
Among those priorities are the understanding of the star formation history of the universe - to which MeerKAT International GHz Tiered Extragalactic Exploration (MIGHTEE) and SuperMIGHTEE will contribute by studying the evolution of star-forming galaxies, and of active galactic nuclei (AGN), where supermassive black holes reside, and how this affects the evolution of galaxies and their environment
Summary
Modern science faces several challenges that are transformative in how science operates and in how innovations and new knowledge are generated and exploited. Projects undertaken by large global collaborations, in which large amounts of observing time are devoted to major key science programs that create vast data sets, is becoming the new paradigm This mode of observing combined with the new instrumental capacities is driving an exponential growth in the rate of data confronting researchers (see Figure 1). This proposal brings together scientific leads of large programs on SKA pathfinders, the LSST and other multi-wavelength facilities along with computer scientists, data scientists and experts in 4th industrial revolution technologies to build solutions for big data astronomy that will enable the full scientific potential of significant investment in major facilities, leverage investment in HPC systems for data intensive research, and develop the expertise to adapt and innovate new technologies to meet. Working jointly on those topics prevents duplication of effort in developing such platforms and promotes sustained collaboration between partners countries beyond astronomy research
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