Community

AENEAS is part of a much larger, global and collaborative effort to support data-intensive science.  Check out how AENEAS is connected to a growing network of European and international projects that bring together astronomers,  e-infrastructure providers, technology experts and businesses on HPC, data storage & networking, and policy makers.

SKA Observatory and Regional Centers

SKA Observatory

The ESDC design must interface smoothly at a technical, operational, and policy level with the SKA Observatory. Therefore, the majority of the partner organisations in the AENEAS project are already part of the SKA design consortia and actively involved in developing the detailed design for the SKA Observatory. Some of the relevant SKA consortia where AENEAS partners play key roles include the Science Data Processor, Signal and Data Transport, and Observatory Support Tools.

SKA Regional Centers

There are several regional data centers that will deliver data to the global astronomical community. While AENEAS is focused on the design of the European SKA regional center, we are in close discussion and collaboration with parallel activities at other locations.

• ERIDANUS (China)
• CIRADA (Canada)

Related Collaborations

SAGrid - AENEAS will leverage on the activities of initiatives such as the SAGrid, the South African National Grid which is responsible for promoting international collaboration of grid computing infrastructures in South Africa and is managed by the Meraka Institute. AENEAS partner EGI works with SAGrid to enable interoperability.

CANFAIR - AENEAS will directly benefit from the EGI collaboration with The Canadian Advanced Network for Astronomical Research (CANFAR), a computing infrastructure for astronomers in Canada and the Canadian Astronomy Data Centre (CADC). CANFAR and EGI are working together in the context of the EC funded project EGI-Engage to integrate both e-Infrastructures towards a seamless
platform for international astronomy research collaboration.

Big Data Science

LOFAR

The SKA precursor, LOFAR, has produced a considerable data archive of over 20 petabytes in its almost five years of full science operations. The data are stored and accessed via a distributed science data archive which is in itself a precursor for the ESDC targeted by AENEAS. The expertise built up on the LOFAR science data archive will be used as important input and reference for the ESDC design. The evolution from LOFAR towards the low-frequency part of the SKA has led to the NL-IBM-NWO-ZA collaboration - a collaborative project on “Precursor Regional Science Data Centres for the SKA” between NRF/SKA-SA, UCT/IDIA, NWO, ASTRON and IBM.

CERN

The SKA Organisation (SKAO) is expected to adopt a tiered model for data and science support similar to that employed for other successful large infrastructures in particular CERN. Therefore, AENEAS team members works closely with colleagues at CERN to help guide the design of the ESDC.

DOME

The DOME project is a research collaboration between ASTRON and IBM on Exascale technology. Its ambition is to provide solutions for the computing challenges of the SKA by delivering new algorithms, photonics, signal processing and new hardware architectures for green computing. DOME has provided many analyses and reports for the Science Data Processor of the SKA that are equally relevant for the ESDC. One of the breakthroughs of DOME is a radically new microserver architecture that could allow the ESDC to become the next generation green data center.

ALMA, e-VLBI

Astronomy

RadioNet

The RadioNet  initiative has worked towards establishing of new  collaborative governance models for the European radio astronomy community, institutes and their facilities . AENEAS will build on the governance models derived by RadioNet. The Hilado software  packages will be used for SKA data reduction and will form an essential part of the ESDC.

LOFAR

The SKA precursor, LOFAR, has produced a considerable data archive of over 20 petabytes in its almost five years of full science operations. The data are stored and accessed via a distributed science data archive which is in itself a precursor for the ESDC targeted by AENEAS. The expertise built up on the LOFAR science data archive will be used as important input and reference for the ESDC design.

Asterics

The Asterics project aims to address the cross-cutting synergies and common challenges shared by the various Astronomy ESFRI facilities (SKA, CTA, KM3NeT & E-ELT). It brings together the astronomy, astrophysics and particle astrophysics communities, in addition to other related research infrastructures. The ASTERICS results on software re-use, robust, scalable and flexible handling and exploitation of the huge data streams and distributed, petascale database systems will be valuable input for the design of AENEAS.

IVOA

The International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA) has been developing standards for exchanging astronomical data, and maintaining registries of data repositories and services, thus forming the VO, a network of interoperable services and data that provides a unique and homogeneous access to a wide range of astronomical data. AENEAS will integrate the VO in the ESDC design. The high demanding requirements of SKA data will force to seek for new solutions to exploit vast volumes of data, make an efficient use of the existing computational resources, enabling data and methods sharing and ensuring reproducibility.

e-Infrastructure

The ESDC designed by AENEAS is dependent of existing European and global e-infrastructure. To meet the demands of SKA for processing power, storage and network capacity, our design will also require providers to innovate. EGI and GEANT are partners in AENEAS and our community is closely connected to those of PRACE Research Infrastructure, EUDAT and ETP4HPC.

European Open Science Cloud

The governance, policies and access modes for the ESDC will be compliant to the principles of openness of the European Open Science Cloud initiative of the EC and the Commons governing rules. AENEAS will adopt the FAIR principles, by helping making SKA data findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. This means that the ESDC must be

• Open in design, participation and use
• Publicly funded & governed with the “commons approach”
• Research-centric with an agile co-design with researchers and research communities
• Interoperable with common standards for resources and services

Several of the AENEAS partners are also directly involved in the kick-off EOSC pilot project and its successor, the EOSC Hub ensuring that the design features of the ESDC are well aligned with the EOSC ambitions.  As the ESDC will be part of an international network, it should in turn help to promote the adoption of EOSC beyond Europe.