Bringing the relevant community together to both design and resource the proposed European SKA Regional Centre (ESRC) is an important goal of the AENEAS project. Identifying the relevant partners and resources represents the initial step. Working with the various European national representatives, the governance work package team has conducted a detailed census of over 47 scientific institutes, expertise centres, infrastructure providers, NRENs, and commercial partners that are likely to provide the underlying infrastructure of the ESRC. A report detailing the capacities, in terms of expertise and computational resources, of these nodes has been compiled and is input to the other work packages. (e.g. as a starting topology for the network design). Further reports summarize the high-level requirements for the SRC network, provide an early design that is largely consistent with these requirements and a document detailing the steps to be taken over the next few years as the SRCs are implemented.
For the more technical work packages, an assessment has been made of the variety of data products the ESRC will need to ingest in order to support SKA science. Using inputs from the SKAO, the computing and storage work package has characterized the type, number, and expected growth rate for the storage resources necessary to host the SKA science archive. In addition, they have characterized the workflows and associated computing resources needed to perform further post-processing and analysis on that data once hosted in the ESRC. This characterization includes a census of current relevant computing tools and middleware and these are included in the design recommendations for the ESRC computing platform. Cost information on computing and storage provided as part of this work, will prove extremely useful for the implementation phase.
The networking work package has conducted an extensive set of data transfer tests to characterize the expected network performance for data movement from the telescope sites in South African and Australia to the ESRC as well as best practices to optimize this performance. These results have been used to investigate different data distribution topologies within Europe as well as the network performance impact for different types of user access and analysis on the distributed SKA data. This resulted in design recommendations.
The work package team on user access and knowledge creation has been analyzing existing user interaction models for radio astronomy data in order to identify where modifications or enhancement will be necessary for the ESRC to support SKA science extraction. As part of this analysis a series of surveys have been conducted of both the user community but also several representative, operational radio astronomy facilities. These surveys considered, among others, types of data, methods of access, level of additional processing required, models for user support, and common analysis tools used. The results of these surveys have been published in deliverable reports and have resulted in recommendations for the ESRC user interfaces necessary to support both data discovery and analysis including possible improvements to the underlying Virtual Observatory (VO) software stack.
Services are essential for a distributed global network, which is intended to work in a seamless fashion, yet must also implement data access policies inherited from the telescope itself. These important services, including federate AAAI, were investigated in the final AENEAS work package.
