March 20, 2025 - by Maria Grazia Giuffreda
This milestone is a testament to the dedication and hard work of the Swiss SKA Regional Center (SRC) development team, spread among different Swiss institutions (the SKACH consortium) with invaluable support from the broader international SRCNet collaboration. CSCS engineers played a critical role in integrating the Alps nodes in Kubernetes and deploying a data-lake storage solution, overcoming technical challenges to ensure seamless integration with the Swiss SRC Platform, which work was led by the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW).
The SKA Observatory is expected to generate vast amounts of scientific data, requiring a sophisticated global network of SKA Regional Centres to manage, process, and distribute it. These SRCs, including the Swiss SRC Node at CSCS (codenamed Gornergrat, a peak in the Alps that is iconic to astronomers), are regionally funded virtual hubs designed to provide SKA scientists with access to data products, computational resources, and collaborative tools for groundbreaking research.
Given the unprecedented scale of SKA data, direct delivery to end users is unfeasible. Instead, SRCs will ensure standardized and efficient access to observatory data, facilitating seamless scientific workflows and promoting collaborative research across the global scientific community. This approach ensures equality of access, supports best practices in Open Science, and enables researchers to maximize the scientific potential of SKA data.
The SRC network will rely on a high-speed data transport system, with projections indicating that 100 Gbit/s bidirectional links will be sufficient for at least the first decade of SKA operations. This global collaborative model, made possible through the efforts of world-class teams of engineers, will enhance scientific productivity and efficiency, unlocking new discoveries and insights from the vast datasets generated by the SKA Observatory.