This is a website for an H2020 project which concluded in 2019 and established the core elements of EOSC. The project's results now live further in www.eosc-portal.eu and www.egi.eu

Radio Astronomy Competence Center

LOFAR (LOw-Frequency Array) is a new-generation radio interferometer constructed in the north of the Netherlands and across Europe to look at Universe through the lens of low radio frequencies, well outside the visible spectrum.

LOFAR will scan the Universe for frequencies between ~10 and 240 MHz (corresponding to wavelengths of 1.2 - 30 m) to identify and study new galaxies, pulsars and other sources of energy.

Challenge

Radio astronomy is one of the most data-intensive research areas of today, pushing the boundaries of data and compute intensive IT infrastructure. Recently, the LOFAR community has reached the stage where a scale up/out of processing power is needed to handle the production pipelines. Several initiatives by individual groups have been piloting processing on National, EGI, and cloud HPC systems.

The Radio Astronomy Competence Center aims to bring together these efforts and open up the capabilities of the European e-infrastructure to a broad radio astronomical community.

Workplan

In the context of the EOSC-hub project, the Radio Astronomy Competence Center will focus on:

  • Federated Authentication and Authorization: integration with the B2ACCESS service to build a system which is partly role-based and partly group-based.
  • Service & data registration: by creating and registering Persistent Identifiers for LOFAR's data collections through B2HANDLE.
  • User workspace: develop space where users can store and share temporary data and products from processing pipelines with B2DROP and B2SHARE.
  • Integrated data processing: improve the potential of the available EGI computational facilities for processing increasing LOFAR data volumes, by assessing the feasibility and limitations of the various types of EGI compute services (Cloud, Cloud Container, High-Throughput) against the different use case requirements.