Title: The challenges and potential solutions for big data of SKA 

Time: Monday, 10:30 - 11:30am, December 14th 

Location: Middle conference room, 3rd floor 

Speaker: Andreas Wicenec 

Abstract: Even if the SKA will not be built to the full-scale due to limited budget, the amount of data it will produce will still be many orders of magnitude bigger than what a typical astronomer is used to deal with. Apart from the astronomers, also the currently used processing libraries and data management frameworks will have a very hard time dealing with this data deluge in an efficient way, if at all. In this talk I will first describe the challenges and the outline potential solutions at least for the technical part of the problem. The part where the scientists are struggling is quite a bit harder to tackle and will require training, but also a change in attitude of future users of the SKA. 

Bio: Professor Andreas Wicenec joined ICRAR at the University of Western Australia in 2010. Born in Germany he completed his diploma and PhD thesis in Physics and Astronomy at the University of Tübingen. His past work includes the development of photometric and astrometric data reduction systems for Tycho data from ESA’s Hipparcos satellite. He was archive scientist at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and involved in the implementation of the archive for ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT). He led the ALMA archive subsystem development group and has been involved in the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA) since 2002. Currently he is leading the Data Intensive Astronomy program of ICRAR to research, design and implement data flows and high performance computing systems for current and future observatories and large scale astronomical surveys. He is also the task leader of the Data Layer task of the SKA Science Data Processor consortium.