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Three universities are making progress in a major project to build a computing infrastructure capable of handling the vast amounts of data that will come from the MeerKAT telescope.
The Interuniversity Institute of Intensive Data Astronomy (IDIA) has developed a cloud of scientific research to enable astronomers to carry out scientific research on data generated by large scientific instruments such as the MeerKAT telescope and other Square Kilometer Array telescopes Array (SKA)
"The SKA addresses the fundamental issues of the universe we live in. But these fantastic scientific goals come with a catch. and that is the huge flow of data.To do the research, we need to have the tools to work with that data, "explained Russ Taylor professor at IDIA, during the course of the research. an event organized this week at Iziko Planetarium and Digital Dome, Cape Town. [19659002ItwastheUniversityofCapeTownWesternCapeandPrinceEdwardIslandtobuildaresearchfieldtohelp
With the IDIA research cloud now in place, astronomers from IDIA partner universities and their scientific collaborators are able to process data from the MeerKAT telescope with their scientific badysis tools operating in the cloud.
Up to now, five major MeerKAT survey projects have asked to use IDIA to process their data.
They are MeerKAT International GigaHertz Extragalactic exploratory survey (Mightee), which looks at where galaxies come from and how they evolve; MeerKAT HI Observations of Galactic Objects Nearby: Southern Transmitters Observation, or Mhongoose, which examines what happens to gaseous hydrogen in galaxies; Looking at the distant Universe with the painting MeerKAT, or Laduma, who studies what happened to the gaseous hydrogen in the primitive universe; the Fornax survey, which examines how galaxies interact; and ThunderKAT, which examines some of the most powerful explosions of the universe
Images projected at the Iziko Planetarium were built on IDIA's IT infrastructure using weak radio waves from one part remote from the universe captured by MeerKAT for the Mightee project. . The images result from the illustrated travel of data from the MeerKAT telescope to IDIA, and then through the scientific badysis pipelines built by the scientists, ultimately transforming the data into images that are used for research.
Taylor said that IDIA was very proud that South African universities were at the forefront of the initiative.
"We need to build the solutions here to work with the data, IDIA is about innovation and data access, and it's about training a new generation of people to work with. the data
"The main users of SKA and MeerKAT will be university researchers. . . and South African universities have the opportunity to start the trip to South Africa. We need researchers to play with data and test new approaches.
IDIA democratizes this process so that researchers can bring their ideas to the data and science. "
IDIA visualization developer Angus Comrie was essential.
" It is important to give researchers what they want quickly. Cloud computing allows us to give them visual feedback very quickly. "
Master's student Sibusiso Mdhluli said that the infrastructure of IDIA had helped enormously.
" Astronomers of old took pictures pictures . The machine learning takes all these pictures and badyzes them in a short period of time. He said that he was particularly interested to see how other disciplines such as medicine could benefit from the infrastructure.
IDIA works with the South African Research Network, as well as the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory, which has a scientific processing facility at the High Performance Computing Center.
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