Humankind’s ability to observe the sky has always been driven by technology. New facilities like the Vera C. Rubin Telescope (Rubin) and ASKAP, MeerKAT, the precursors to the Square Kilometre Array, will soon allow us to monitor the sky in nearly real-time, generating massive digital databases that researchers can mine to further our understanding of stars, gas, galaxies and dark matter.
Prof. Renée Hlozek and Prof. Kristine Spekkens (Queen’s University) lead the Canadian Data Intensive Astrophysics PLatform (CanDIAPL, pronounced ‘candy apple’), which is a cloud computing centre infrastructure and software pipelines and infrastructure to process the millions of gigabytes of raw data from Rubin and the SKA Pathfinders, as well as multimessenger surveys like the International Gravitational Wave Network (IGWN)
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory (Rubin) is a revolutionary new 8.4-metre telescope that has just started scanning the sky rapidly (roughly once every three days), generating an all-sky movie in its Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). Rubin will generate millions of alerts to new astronomical objects and stacks of scans will produce the deepest wide-field maps ever made. CanDIAPL will provide tools and software to use these exquisite data for new science.
The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is a vast network of antennas and dishes under construction in Australia and South Africa which, when completed, will be the world’s most powerful radio telescope. To prepare for SKA operations in 2028, Canadians have invested heavily in SKA pathfinders, superb survey instruments in their own right that are generating enormous data sets and revolutionizing our view of the radio sky. These are the Meer Karoo Array Telescope (MeerKAT), an array of 64 radio dishes in South Africa’s Karoo desert; the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA), which is an array of 4096 antenna tiles and receivers in the Western Australian desert; the Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP), which consists of 36 dishes co-located with the MWA that uses novel phased array feed technology to provide a field of view similar to Rubin’s. CanDIAPL will fund the hardware and software needed for Canada to globally lead science from the SKA pathfinders, tools we will scale to handle data from the SKA itself.
The project is now in full swing, with several developers working hard to build the software pipelines to run on the computing hardware that is being installed as part of the Canadian Advanced Network for Astronomical Research (CANFAR) and within the Waterloo hub of the Digital Research Alliance of Canada (Alliance).Â
In addition to members of the Dunlap Institute and the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Toronto, the partnership includes the University of Alberta, Queen’s University, Western University, McGill, Waterloo and the University of British Columbia.
More information on the project and the collaboration is available at https://www.candiapl.ca/
