A Cyber Infrastructure for the SKA Telescope Manager

TL;DR

The paper presents a cyber-infrastructure framework for the SKA Telescope Manager, enabling scalable, high-availability management of SKA operations through tailored IaaS and PaaS solutions using virtualization and hardware resources.

Contribution

It introduces a specialized cyber platform (LINFRA) for SKA TM, providing scalable, tailored IaaS/PaaS infrastructure for different SKA Phase 1 telescopes with virtualization and hardware integration.

Findings

Provides a flexible, scalable cyber platform for SKA TM operations.

Supports deployment of multiple components with virtualization.

Ensures high availability and performance tailored to telescope locations.

Abstract

The Square Kilometre Array Telescope Manager (SKA TM) will be responsible for assisting the SKA Operations and Observation Management, carrying out System diagnosis and collecting Monitoring & Control data from the SKA sub-systems and components. To provide adequate compute resources, scalability, operation continuity and high availability, as well as strict Quality of Service, the TM cyber-infrastructure (embodied in the Local Infrastructure - LINFRA) consists of COTS hardware and infrastructural software (for example: server monitoring software, host operating system, virtualization software, device firmware), providing a specially tailored Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution. The TM infrastructure provides services in the form of computational power, software defined networking, power, storage abstractions, and high level, state of the art IaaS and PaaS management interfaces. This cyber platform will be tailored to each of the two SKA Phase 1 telescopes (SKA_MID in South Africa and SKA_LOW in Australia) instances, each presenting different computational and storage infrastructures and conditioned by location. This cyber platform will provide a compute model enabling TM to manage the deployment and execution of its multiple components (observation scheduler, proposal submission tools, M&C components, Forensic tools and several Databases, etc). In this sense, the TM LINFRA is primarily focused towards the provision of isolated instances, mostly resorting to virtualization technologies, while defaulting to bare hardware if specifically required due to performance, security, availability, or other requirement.