Bringing Computation to the data: Interoperable serverless function execution for astrophysical data analysis in the SRCNet

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Parra-Royón, Manuel, Garrido-Sánchez, Julián, Sánchez-Expósito, Susana, Mendoza, María Ángeles, Barnsley, Rob, Moraghan, Anthony, Sánchez, Jesús, Darriba, Laura, Ruíz-Monje, Carlos, Joao, Edgar, Moldón, Javier, Salgado, Jesús, Verdes-Montenegro, Lourdes
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Parra-Royón, Manuel
Garrido-Sánchez, Julián
Sánchez-Expósito, Susana
Mendoza, María Ángeles
Barnsley, Rob
Moraghan, Anthony
Sánchez, Jesús
Darriba, Laura
Ruíz-Monje, Carlos
Joao, Edgar
Moldón, Javier
Salgado, Jesús
Verdes-Montenegro, Lourdes
author_facet Parra-Royón, Manuel
Garrido-Sánchez, Julián
Sánchez-Expósito, Susana
Mendoza, María Ángeles
Barnsley, Rob
Moraghan, Anthony
Sánchez, Jesús
Darriba, Laura
Ruíz-Monje, Carlos
Joao, Edgar
Moldón, Javier
Salgado, Jesús
Verdes-Montenegro, Lourdes
contents Serverless computing is a paradigm in which the underlying infrastructure is fully managed by the provider, enabling applications and services to be executed with elastic resource provisioning and minimal operational overhead. A core model within this paradigm is Function-as-a-Service (FaaS), where lightweight functions are deployed and triggered on demand, scaling seamlessly with workload. FaaS offers flexibility, cost-effectiveness, and fine-grained scalability, qualities particularly relevant for large-scale scientific infrastructures where data volumes are too large to centralise and computation must increasingly occur close to the data. The Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO) exemplifies this challenge. Once operational, it will generate about 700~PB of data products annually, distributed across the SKA Regional Centre Network (SRCNet), a federation of international centres providing storage, computing, and analysis services. In such a context, FaaS offers a mechanism to bring computation to the data. We studied the principles of serverless and FaaS computing and explored their application to radio astronomy workflows. Representative functions for astrophysical data analysis were developed and deployed, including micro-functions derived from existing libraries and wrappers around domain-specific applications. In particular, a Gaussian convolution function was implemented and integrated within the SRCNet ecosystem. The use case demonstrates that FaaS can be embedded into the existing SRCNet ecosystem of services, allowing functions to run directly at sites where data replicas are stored. This reduces latency, minimises transfers, and improves efficiency, aligning with federated, data-proximate computation. The results show that serverless models provide a scalable and efficient pathway to address the data volumes of the SKA era.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_07308
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Bringing Computation to the data: Interoperable serverless function execution for astrophysical data analysis in the SRCNet
Parra-Royón, Manuel
Garrido-Sánchez, Julián
Sánchez-Expósito, Susana
Mendoza, María Ángeles
Barnsley, Rob
Moraghan, Anthony
Sánchez, Jesús
Darriba, Laura
Ruíz-Monje, Carlos
Joao, Edgar
Moldón, Javier
Salgado, Jesús
Verdes-Montenegro, Lourdes
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
Serverless computing is a paradigm in which the underlying infrastructure is fully managed by the provider, enabling applications and services to be executed with elastic resource provisioning and minimal operational overhead. A core model within this paradigm is Function-as-a-Service (FaaS), where lightweight functions are deployed and triggered on demand, scaling seamlessly with workload. FaaS offers flexibility, cost-effectiveness, and fine-grained scalability, qualities particularly relevant for large-scale scientific infrastructures where data volumes are too large to centralise and computation must increasingly occur close to the data. The Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO) exemplifies this challenge. Once operational, it will generate about 700~PB of data products annually, distributed across the SKA Regional Centre Network (SRCNet), a federation of international centres providing storage, computing, and analysis services. In such a context, FaaS offers a mechanism to bring computation to the data. We studied the principles of serverless and FaaS computing and explored their application to radio astronomy workflows. Representative functions for astrophysical data analysis were developed and deployed, including micro-functions derived from existing libraries and wrappers around domain-specific applications. In particular, a Gaussian convolution function was implemented and integrated within the SRCNet ecosystem. The use case demonstrates that FaaS can be embedded into the existing SRCNet ecosystem of services, allowing functions to run directly at sites where data replicas are stored. This reduces latency, minimises transfers, and improves efficiency, aligning with federated, data-proximate computation. The results show that serverless models provide a scalable and efficient pathway to address the data volumes of the SKA era.
title Bringing Computation to the data: Interoperable serverless function execution for astrophysical data analysis in the SRCNet
topic Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07308