Square Kilometer Array (SKA) decision timetable - a waiting game

[Shark Bait (Stu)]

Originally Posted by mswhin63

Personally the media assumed what happened because the Minister didn't give them what they wanted.

I saw an interview the Minister on the TV a few days ago. I cannot quote him word for word, but he said we should be 'realistic' about our chances of winning the bid in light of the economic development that this project would bring to the African Nations involved.

He did not sound that confident to me. Enthusiasm is not one of his strengths either. Maybe he already knows the outcome?

I am still hoping that Australia wins the bid.

[Visionoz (Bill)]

Wouldn't surprise me at all if Australia lost out on this one either! Somehow ugly politics gets in the way all the time, wonder why?

Cheers
Bill

[gary]

Since the Site Advisory Committee report is currently confidential, one can assume by the
Daniel Flitton article in today's Sydney Morning Herald that he was privy to a leak.

Nature has picked up on the report and says -

Originally Posted by Nature, Geoff Brumfiel, 9 March 2012

The SKA Site Advisory Committee's decision was first reported on 10 March in the Sydney Morning Herald. A source familiar with the site-selection process confirmed to Nature that the panel had indeed made a decision, but added that it was a close call. "This is not an enormous preference for one over the other," he says.

Nature article here -
http://www.nature.com/news/south-afr...escope-1.10205

An article that appeared on the Chinese Xinhua News Agency on 22 Feb 2012,
several days after the Site Advisory Committee report was submitted to the
SKA Board is possibly telling.

Originally Posted by xinuhuanet.com 22 Feb 2012

"Now that the Site Advisory Committee of the SKA has evaluated the scientific, technical, cost and other aspects of the bid and made its recommendation about the best site, the agreed process must follow its course," said Derek Hanekom, South African Deputy Minister of Science and Technology.

Originally Posted by xinuhuanet.com 22 Feb 2012

In a related development, African ambassadors meeting in Beijing on Tuesday said they want SKA evaluation process to be respected.

"Africa believes that the Square Kilometre Array should be built on the site which is recommended by the independent SKA Site Advisory Committee, based on their evaluation of the scientific, technical, infrastructure and cost factors for both the African and Australian/New Zealand bids," the ambassadors said in a statement e-mailed to Xinhua on Wednesday.

So it might be construed that the African nations were confident enough of the
Site Advisory Committee report as far back as 22 Feb 2012 that they were
willing to send out the message that the voting nations should abide by
its recommendations.

That article in full here -
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/wo..._131425451.htm

The Murchison site in Australia is at an elevation of 460m and the Karoo site in
South Africa is at an elevation of 1000m.

The phase and amplitude of the signals arriving from space are affected by
the ionosphere and the troposphere.

In particular, for the operating frequencies up to 10GHz, the characterization
of the troposphere at the locations was deemed to be highly relevant.
In particular, phase fluctuations introduced by precipitable water vapour have
an impact.

The SKA Developmental Office at the University of Manchester in conjunction
with JPL built a pair of systems to help measure the tropospheric conditions
at each site. Each system consisted of a pair of 1m antennas over a 200m
baseline pointing at a geostationary satellite.

The systems were delivered to each site in the first week of 2011 and have
supposedly been running from about March 2011 to gather statistical data.
See http://www.skatelescope.org/public/2...ropoCharac.pdf

When the Site Selection Committee report is made public, it will be interesting
to see the results of this particular test.

Murchison received 247.1mm of rain in 2011, slightly above the mean of 241mm.

If Australia is unsuccessful in its bid to host the SKA, one should be mindful that
Australia is still part of the international consortium involved in it.

Nevertheless, it will be a huge blow to astronomy in Australia if we are not successful
as the nation to host it and the long term ramifications will be very significant.

The only hope now for Australia is what Nature's source reports is that it was a close call
and that the final vote goes Australia's way. As Nature reports -

Originally Posted by Nature

According to Nature's source, because the two sites are so close in merit, both are still in contention. China, Italy, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands — the SKA voting board members — could yet decide either way. It is even possible that the array could be shared between both nations, although this would probably increase the construction costs.

A final site decision could come as soon as 4 April, when a meeting of the board is tentatively scheduled in Amsterdam.

With the initial project cost of $2.5 billion and an operational cost of about $25 billion
over 50 years, the relativities of the Aussie Dollar to the Euro and Pound will not
have been helping Australia's pitch to the Europeans. (See graphs below).
The irony of course, is that the high dollar is being partially driven from demand
from China for resources out of states such as WA - the very state the SKA plans
to be hosted in.

[Terry B]

Interesting Gary.
So who is in the know at SMH and how accurate?

[gary]

Originally Posted by Terry B

Interesting Gary.
So who is in the know at SMH and how accurate?

Hi Terry,

Journalist Daniel Flitton's profile appears here in The Age -
http://about.theage.com.au/view_profile.php?intid=1469

A Fulbright Scholar, a former university lecturer in international relations and a
former government intelligence analyst, one might reasonably expect that Flitton
has established a wide range of sources over the years.

The Nature article source corroborates the claim but qualifies it as being a close call.

The Chinese press article of 22 Feb 2012 raises the speculation that the South African
government was aware of the site recommendation and hence emboldened them to play the
card that says "the agreed process must follow its course".

[gary]

SKA members (Australia, Canada, China, Italy, New Zealand, South Africa,
The Netherlands and the United Kingdom) are meeting at this moment in Amsterdam.

On March 19th, the SKA Board agreed to pass on the site recommendation to
the members.

According to a note from the Chair -

Originally Posted by SKA Chair 19 March 2012

The members will meet in Amsterdam on 3 April 2012, but it is not likely
that this meeting will make a final decision on the site; rather it will be the start
of a process of discussion and negotiation between the members

The SKA Board will then meet April 4th (i.e. later today Australian time).

In other related news, IBM and the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy
(ASTRON) have teamed in a 32.9 million Euro, five year initiative named DOME,
which is exploring computer architectures to handle the 1,000,000,000,000,000,000
bytes a day of data the SKA will produce. That is more than twice the amount
of data that is transferred over the entire Internet everyday and more than 100 times
the data produced by the Large Hadron Collider.

A computer system that can handle this much information has never been
built.

Wired magazine are reporting that the DOME team are looking into aspects such
as three-dimensional chip stacking.
See http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/20...-data-per-day/

As it is with the massive data centers that power sites such as Google, an enormous
part of the computing problem for the SKA will be thermodynamics, that is dealing
with the enormous amount of heat that is produced by such an enormous number
of computers.

So what is in it for IBM? As Wired reports -

Originally Posted by wired.com

Dr. Martin Schmatz of IBM Research in Zurich notes that “big data analysis is not only important for astronomers, but more and more important for many industrial applications, like for example in health care.” As more industries generate enormous data sets, curating and analyzing information gets more complicated. IBM envisions incorporating exascale technology into some of these more profitable sectors in coming years, and the SKA provides a convenient testing ground.

One thing is for sure. Information has become the currency of the 21st Century.

[gary]

As a footnote to my previous post ...

This morning's Australian is running with this story by Leigh Dayton on the meeting that is taking place -
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news...-1226317968580

We may expect a communique in the coming hours but as Brian Boyle points out, "Australia and New Zealand are still
very much in discussions and negotiations with the board and the members".

And one can expect the Africans are too.

[Octane (Humayun)]

That DOME project sounds insane!

Fingers-crossed for a positive outcome for Australia!

H

[sheeny (Al)]

Originally Posted by Octane

That DOME project sounds insane!

H

Shades of Deep Thought!

Al.

[Liz]

They are talking about it tonight on 'The Project'.

[jebediah (Michael)]

Not a bad story, but can you believe the hosts of The Project said, "give it to South Africa, they need the money"??

[gary]

According to an article today by John Yeld in the South African newspaper, The Star -

Originally Posted by John Yeld, The Star

Science and Technology Director-General Phil Mjwara, who represents SA on both SKA boards and as a general member, explained that Australia and New Zealand had raised five areas of concern after the SKA site advisory committee made its recommendation in February, and after it had been endorsed by the SKA siting group.

Three of these outstanding issues had been satisfactorily resolved between the board and the committees, but two had remained on the table and were to be discussed yesterday.

Mjwara said he believed the members could resolve these issues. “If our optimism is correct… then the board will probably discuss how to make the announcement (of the winning site today).”

But SKA SA director Bernie Fanaroff, who is also a SKA organisation board member, said members had a direct interest in how the telescope would be operated, and that this involved significantly more than just the site selection.

Also, another four countries had indicated they intended signing up within the next few months, and had been invited to today’s board meeting.

“So I suspect that the discussion will go on a bit (beyond today) about how to make this an inclusive process".

Article here -
http://www.iol.co.za/the-star/ska-wo...ndor-1.1269977

[gary]

The following news item has just appeared on the official skatelescope.org web site -

Originally Posted by skatelescope.org

SKA Members meet to discuss site selection

4th April 2012, Amsterdam, the Netherlands – The Members of the SKA Organisation met at Schiphol, the Netherlands, on 3 April 2012, for their first General Meeting. They noted the site selection advisory committee’s report and the associated commentary that had been passed to them by the SKA Organisation’s board following the board meeting in Manchester last month.

The Members wished to move ahead with the site selection process, and recognised that it is desirable to maintain an inclusive approach to SKA. They noted that it is important to maximise the value from the investments made by both candidate host regions. They therefore agreed to set up a small scientific working group to explore possible implementation options that would achieve this. This working group will report back to the Members at a meeting in mid-May; its report will provide additional information to facilitate the site decision for SKA.

The Board of the SKA Organisation met on 4 April, following the Members meeting, and discussed progress of the project. The Board approved an application for Associate Membership in the SKA Organisation from India (represented by the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics).

http://www.skatelescope.org/news/ska...ite-selection/

The key sentence is "They noted that it is important to maximise the value from the investments made by both candidate host regions."

[AstralTraveller (David)]

So, they are going to share it? If it is technically possible they could wind up with a baseline from NZ to SA. But where will the computing centre be?

[gary]

Originally Posted by AstralTraveller

So, they are going to share it? If it is technically possible they could wind up with a baseline from NZ to SA. But where will the computing centre be?

Hi David,

The original SKA architecture called for a 5km central core of antennas, a further mid-region
of a smaller number of dishes extending out 180km and then five spiral arms with dishes
spaced logarithmically out to 3000km.

Firstly keep in mind that in order to be useful, stations at the furthest distance
from the core need to have the target above the horizon.

Since the hour angle between West Australia and South Africa is approximately
six and three quarter hours, if the core was in one country and a long
baseline station in the other, targets would either have to be circumpolar
from both sites or have an appropriate range of limited zenith distances.
Keep in mind it is some 8500km between the two sites, much longer than
the original baseline proposal.

Secondly, the amount of data produced by the core is astronomical, exceeding the
current entire world internet traffic. This is sent by dedicated optical cables in trenches
to the on-site correlator. It is then distilled down where it is transferred to
the data center but still the amount of data is enormous.

In the Australian proposal, longer baseline stations will use fibres leased from the
NBN, possibly dark fibre. An optical fibre link to New Zealand would also be leased.

So in a nutshell, because of the enormous amount of data involved, the computing
center will need to be located in the same country as the core.

If one country was to act as a long baseline site for the other, dark fibre would
need to be leased connecting the countries. If it is available, it would be expensive,
as it is leased by the km.

Based on current trends, global internet traffic is presently increasing about 100 fold
every 12 years. One of the hopes therefore is that over the timescale of the SKA
construction, a leased dark fibre between the two countries may become less expensive
in relative terms.

However, whichever country the core is sited will also host the main computing
center and they will be fortunate indeed as they will be hosting the most powerful
purpose-built data handling system in existence.

Information is already one of the most important commodities of the 21st Century.
Those countries that fully embrace information and communications technologies
will have a large competitive edge over those that don't and exposure to a system
such as that proposed for the SKA could have enormous spin-offs.

But at the end of the day, it is all about the best science outcome and that is what
the new working group would have been charged with to investigate.

[astroron (Ron)]

Mind Boggling stuff Gary
Thanks for keeping us informed,
and most of all for explaining it so easily.
Cheers

[gary]

Photos
Brian Boyle has provided a link to a photo by Barry Turner which shows
a recent aerial shot of the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO) including
thirteen Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) antennas in
various stages of construction.

All 35 antennas are planned to be on site by the end of April 2012.

Great shot -
http://twitter.com/#!/BrianBoyleSKA/.../photo/1/large

In this photo taken by Ross Forsyth, zebra finches are perched in a tree
next to one of the new antennas.
http://twitter.com/#!/BrianBoyleSKA/.../photo/1/large

First science papers
Brian has also indicated on Twitter that the first science papers from the MRO
are emerging such as this one entitled "Low Frequency Imaging of Fields at High
Galactic Latitude with the Murchison Widefield Array 32-Element Prototype".

See -
http://arxiv.org/abs/1203.5790

Australian Govt welcomes appointment of new siting option working group decision
A 5th April 2012 media release by Science Minister, Chris Evans, appears here
stating that the said "the Government welcomed the decision to appoint a working group
of suitably qualified scientific advisers to further examine siting options for the project."

See -
http://minister.innovation.gov.au/ch...edecision.aspx

Nature reports on split site proposal
In this April 10th 2012 article by Geoff Brumfiel that appeared in Nature, some
astronomers, such as Heino Falcke from Radboud University in the Netherlands
are proposing "to divide the project by placing the higher-frequency dishes on
one continent and the lower-frequency antennas on the other."

Originally Posted by Nature article by Geoff Brumfiel

Doing so would almost certainly raise the SKA’s price tag, because computing centres and power would be needed in both remote locations, says Albert Zijlstra, director of the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics in Manchester, UK. But splitting the antennas by frequency would avoid the need for a high-throughput data link connecting the two sites, something that Zijlstra and Falcke both expect would be even more costly.

Zijlstra says that he can see little scientific advantage to splitting the project, aside from a few extra hours of observation time gained from having the telescope’s two parts separated by such a vast distance. Falcke agrees. “It’s a question of politics,” he says.

Article here -
http://www.nature.com/news/giant-tel...-homes-1.10404

[gary]

Brian Boyle has posted a recent nice snapshot showing engineers traveling back
and forth on motor bikes fitted with trailers between the ASKAP antennas at Murchison.
Shot here -
http://twitter.com/#!/BrianBoyleSKA/.../photo/1/large

[Adelastro1 (Wayne England)]

Just been to a fascinating talk at the ASSA monthly general meeting by Dr Carole Jackson, Business Development Manager for CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science (CASS) where she spoke mainly of the ASKAP but also the SKA. The ASKAP looks amazing and it's great to see that we can build something of that scientific calibre in this country. It's mind boggling how much data will be received and the processing power required just for the 30 odd telescopes being built let alone the 3000 for the SKA. For ASKAP, 2 terra bytes of data per second per telescope will be produced! The 87th fastest super computer will be built to process it all! ASKAP will look at 30sq deg at any one time using new Australian designed detector arrays at the scopes focal point. I think from memory about $150m has been spent on the telescopes with another $250m on infrastructure at the Murchison site. How much more do we need to show that we can build the SKA successfully! We've shown how to build it and what needs to be done to solve the problems, the best detectors and fibre optic network (NBN), and we have the best site (for scientific research) in the world. Unfortunately there's politics...

Dr Jackson said the earliest that the final site announcement for the SKA will be made is the end of this month (there's a meeting in the Netherlands) and hopefully the latest will be July. So not long to go!