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SDP moves to its Critical Design Review

After many years of effort, on 31st October 2018, the SDP Consortium submitted its design documentation for Critical Design Review (CDR). The SDP element already went through a pre-CDR review in June which included an Architecture Tradeoff Anaysis Method (ATAM) to identify risks and gaps with the architecture and examined the readiness of the System Engineering artefacts. The current documentation set addressed concerns raised in the pre-CDR and includes a new category of reports detailing the key prototyping activities that have been undertaken. Alongside the reviewable document set the Consortium have written up a lot of additional supporting material into new SDP Memos that are available for reference. A high-level overview presentation is being prepared for 9th November and a set of informal discussions will be held on 22nd/23rd November to explore the prototyping and modelling work developed up to submission. The SDP CDR meeting itself takes place in January 2019 with the Design Consortium expected to close by 31st March 2019 after which SKAO takes over managing activities (from that point until construction formally starts they are known as bridging activities) initially in support of the System Level CDR and then with a view to readying for construction.

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Lovell telescope behind new SKA HQ building on 17 Jan 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).

SKA SC17 keynote

Members of the SKA Organisation and SDP Consortium are in Denver this week attending the annual SuperCompuing conference. This year the conference keynote "Life, the Universe and Computing: The Story of the SKA Telescope" was given by the SKA Director General Phil Diamond, and the SKA Regional Centre Project Scientist Rosie Bolton.