Challenges and strategies for the maintenance of the SKA Telescope Manager

Abstract

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is an ambitious project aimed to build a radio telescope that will enable breakthrough science not possible with current facilities over the next 50 years. Because of this long expected operational period, the maintenance of Telescope Manager (TM), the SKA Element responsible for the coordination of all Elements composing the Telescope (e.g. Dishes for mid-frequency or Low-Frequency Aperture Arrays), plays a crucial role for the overall SKA operation. A challenge is represented by the technological evolution in hardware and software, which is rather fast nowadays: only in the last 10 years, for instance, new operating systems were born, as well as new technologies for data storage and for calculation. Dealing with such changing environment deserves therefore a deep analysis in terms of maintenance. In spite of the importance of hardware maintenance for TM, its software maintenance is actually the real challenge, given TM is a system almost entirely composed by software applications. In computer science, indeed, it is almost impossible to build a software which does not need to be changed over time: new requirements emerge, old requirements change during application lifetime, errors are discovered or performance must be improved. For all these reasons the management of software changes is critical to maintain the value of the software developed, especially for a complex system like SKA TM. In this paper the maintenance for both SKA TM hardware and software is presented with respect to the Operational (i.e. related to Maintenance Process) and Organizational (i.e. related to Logistic Support) aspects.