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Hauptverfasser: Kemp, Ian, Tingay, Steven J, Midgley, Stuart, Mitchell, Daniel
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.17657
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author Kemp, Ian
Tingay, Steven J
Midgley, Stuart
Mitchell, Daniel
author_facet Kemp, Ian
Tingay, Steven J
Midgley, Stuart
Mitchell, Daniel
contents The ongoing exponential growth of computational power, and the growth of the commercial High Performance Computing (HPC) industry, has led to a point where ten commercial systems currently exceed the performance of the highest-used HPC system in radio astronomy in Australia, and one of these exceeds the expected requirements of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Science Data Processors. In order to explore implications of this emerging change in the HPC landscape for radio astronomy, we report results from a survey conducted via semi-structured interviews with 14 Australian scientists and providers with experience of commercial HPC in astronomy and similar data intensive fields. We supplement these data with learnings from two earlier studies in which we investigated the application of commercial HPC to radio astronomy data processing, using cases with very different data and processing considerations. We use the established qualitative research approach of thematic analysis to extract key messages from our interviews. We find that commercial HPC can provide major advantages in accessibility and availability, and may contribute to increasing researchers' career productivity. Significant barriers exist, however, including the need for access to increased expertise in systems programming and parallelisation, and a need for recognition in research funding. We comment on potential solutions to these issues.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_17657
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Experiences of Commercial Supercomputing in Radio Astronomy Data Processing
Kemp, Ian
Tingay, Steven J
Midgley, Stuart
Mitchell, Daniel
Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
The ongoing exponential growth of computational power, and the growth of the commercial High Performance Computing (HPC) industry, has led to a point where ten commercial systems currently exceed the performance of the highest-used HPC system in radio astronomy in Australia, and one of these exceeds the expected requirements of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Science Data Processors. In order to explore implications of this emerging change in the HPC landscape for radio astronomy, we report results from a survey conducted via semi-structured interviews with 14 Australian scientists and providers with experience of commercial HPC in astronomy and similar data intensive fields. We supplement these data with learnings from two earlier studies in which we investigated the application of commercial HPC to radio astronomy data processing, using cases with very different data and processing considerations. We use the established qualitative research approach of thematic analysis to extract key messages from our interviews. We find that commercial HPC can provide major advantages in accessibility and availability, and may contribute to increasing researchers' career productivity. Significant barriers exist, however, including the need for access to increased expertise in systems programming and parallelisation, and a need for recognition in research funding. We comment on potential solutions to these issues.
title Experiences of Commercial Supercomputing in Radio Astronomy Data Processing
topic Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.17657