Five projects awarded in NWO call Big bang, big data: Innovating ICT as a driver for astronomy

The division of Physical Sciences (EW) of NWO has funded five projects with a grant in the progamme Big bang, big data: Innovating ICT as a driver for astronomy. The projects are awarded to research the exascale technologies necessary to handle the huge amounts of data that will be generated by the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) in South-Africa, the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope. The winning research projects should lead to additional Big Data ICT innovations as a driver for astronomy and for society at large, and to build up a research network in the Netherlands.

The budget available is € 2.2 million, provided by NWO Physical Sciences for 50%, and the other 50% together by ASTRON and IBM. The deadline for submitting proposals was January 24, 2014. The funded projects are the following:
• The Computer Science challenge of calibrating the ionosphere over the SKA sky - Prof. dr. H.J.A. Röttgering, University of Leiden;
• Data reduction and image formation for future radio telescopes (DRIFT) - Prof. dr. ir. A.J. van der Veen, TU Delft;
• Beyond Compressive Sensing: Learning Radio-Interferometric Image Reconstruction - Dr. M. Welling, University of Amsterdam;
• Improving Power-Efficiency for Digital processing in Radio Astronomy (IMPEDRA) - Dr. ir. A.B.J. Kokkeler, University Twente;
• Layered Astronomical Databases (LAD) - Prof. dr. M.L. Kersten, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI).

In this project DOME, ASTRON and IBM have joined forces to create new technology for handling the huge amounts of data that will be generated by the SKA. DOME is one of the most data-intensive science projects ever, addressing exascale technologies: ways to handle exabytes of data - where one exabyte equals a thousand petabytes, or a thousand petabytes. Innovation through and within ICT is essential to take the next giant leap in astronomy. The research programme Big Bang, Big Data: Innovating ICT as Driver for Astronomy covers the following topics: Algorithms & Machines, Access Patterns, Microservers, Accelerators, Compressive Sampling, and Real-time communication models for exascale computing.