The SKAO Regional Centre network (SRCNet) will be an essential building block for science exploration: it acts as the distributed computing and data backbone that turns massive SKAO radio telescope raw outputs into usable research. Without this global network, managing the petabytes of daily data required to study galaxy evolution, dark energy, and fundamental physics would be impossible.
Core Functions necessary for SRCnet Science Exploration:
- Data Management at Scale: Handling over 700 petabytes of annual data produced by telescopes in South Africa and Australia, converting raw signals into advanced science products.
- Global Access & Equality: Providing a single, unified digital doorway for researchers worldwide to access, process, and analyze data regardless of their physical location.
- Advanced Computing & AI: Employing high-performance computing clusters, data lakes, and machine learning tools to rapidly identify cosmic objects lile pulsar and black hole candidates and map cosmic hydrogen.
- Open Science Collaboration: Fostering a shared, collaborative environment where software, workflows, and processing tasks are distributed efficiently without data bottlenecks.
The ENGAGE SKA
Portugal is a founding member of the Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO). Its local infrastructure connects to the network via a specialized national consortium - ENGAGE SKA, a Research Infrastructure of the Portuguese national roadmap of a Research Infrastructure of strategic relevance. ENGAGE SKA has installed OBLIVION at Évora, a supercomputer facility to advance the national state of the art of HPC services for fundamental science and innovation that is managed by the HPC Chair, a research and development infrastructure at the University of Évora that originated from ENGAGE SKA. The HPC Chair has established itself as a cornerstone of HPC and AI services for astronomy, space science and many other areas of research. The HPC Chair also contributes to advance knowledge transfer to the socioeconomic regional fabric:
- The Supercomputing Anchor: The ENGAGE SKA Consortium serves as the primary technical interface between local scientists and the SKAO.
- The OBLIVION Supercomputer: Portuguese processing power is driven by the OBLIVION Supercomputer, hosted at the University of Évora. This hardware acts as Portugal's computational muscle within the global network.
- Industrial Software Contribution: Beyond consuming data, Portuguese institutions actively code for the network's foundational ecosystem. A considerable spill-over effect has been created through the HPC Chair, a research and development infrastructure at the University of Évora that originated from ENGAGE SKA. It unites a consortium of seven European universities (in Portugal, Spain and the UK), three research centres, one Collaborative Laboratory (CoLab), public organisations, and eleven enterprises, including leading technological companies such as Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
