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Consortium

The SDP is a Consortium made up of astrophysicists, engineers and computer scientists mostly work for universities and research institutes.

Our Consortium is currently made up of the following full partners:

  • Canadian Astronomy Data Centre (CADC)
  • Canadian Universities Consortium
  • Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC)
  • Chinese Universities Collaboration
  • Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO)
  • Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH (JUELICH)
  • International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR)
  • Max-Planck-Institut fuer Radioastronomie (MPIfR)
  • Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON)
  • New Zealand Alliance (NZA)
  • Pawsey Supercomputing Centre
  • Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC)
  • SKA South Africa
  • University of Cambridge
  • University of Manchester
  • University of Oxford
  • Victoria University of Wellington

We also have the below institutes as associate partners:

  • Centro Nacional de Supercomputación - Barcelona Supercomputing Centre
  • Fundacion Centro de Supercomputacion de Castilla y Leon (FCSCL)
  • Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia (IAA-CSIC)
  • Institute of Space Science and Astronomy, University of Malta (ISSA)
  • Portuguese ENGAGE SKA Consortium

Some SDP partners have taken out contracts with companies to support the design work they are doing.

Recent news

Lovell telescope behind new SKA HQ building on 17 Jan 2019

SDP passes its Critical Design Review

8 February 2019

At the end of October 2018 the SKA SDP Consortium submitted its Critical Design Review (CDR) documentation pack. Contained in this were the formal deliverables of the design consortium covering all aspects of the SDP architecture, system engineering and programmatics (the documents are available here).  The documents were received by the CDR reviewers (consisting of 3 external members and 15 internal to SKAO) who proceeded to generate clarification questions, requests and notes in the form of observations (called OARs after the Observation Action Register approach commonly used for them). Where possible these were addressed via communication exchanges in JIRA OAR tickets.

From 15th to 19th January 2019 members of the SDP Consortium then visited the SKAO HQ at Jodrell Bank (see figure 1), where direct discussions took place in the new SKAO Council Chamber (see figure 2), to further explore the architecture and identify risks as part of an SEI Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method (ATAM).

SDP1

SDP eNews - December 2018

11 January 2019

At the end of October the SDP Consortium submitted its full document set for Critical Design Review. (These can be found at http://ska-sdp.org/publications/sdp-cdr-documentation) together with a large number of supporting memos (http://ska-sdp.org/publications/released-sdp-memos-i and http://ska-sdp.org/publications/released-sdp-memos-ii). Table 1 below shows the documents in three main categories: those associated with software and hardware architecture; those explaining the supporting prototyping work that has been undertaken in support of the architecture, and finally those associated with system engineering (SE) and programmatics aspects (e.g. specifications for how SDP interfaces with the wider telescope systems and how components will be constructed). The documents will receive observations from a panel of reviewers up until the end of December. Responses to the observations and scenarios to ‘test’ the architecture will then be discussed at a review meeting from 15th to 18th January 2019 at Jodrell Bank.