The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is an ambitious project to construct the world’s most powerful radio telescope and enable transformational scientific discoveries across a wide range of topics in physics and astronomy. With two telescopes sites located in the deserts of South African and West Australia, an operational headquarters based in the UK, and 12 different member countries contributing to the design and construction, the SKA is truly a global endeavor. Once operational, the SKA is expected to produce an archive of science data products with an impressive growth rate on the order of 700 petabytes per year. Hosting the resulting SKA archive and subsequent science extraction by users will require a global research infrastructure providing additional capacity in networking, storage, computing, and support. This research infrastructure is currently foreseen to take the form of a federated, global network of SKA Regional Centres (SRCs). These SRCs will be the primary interface for researchers in extracting scientific results from SKA data and, as such, are essential to the ultimate success of the telescope. The unprecedented scale of the expected SKA data stream, however, requires a fundamental change in the way radio astronomers approach extracting their science. Efforts are already underway in various countries around the world to define and deploy the seeds of what will grow into a community-provided research infrastructure that can deliver SKA science. In this talk, I will give an update on these initial efforts as well as the various technological, management, and sociological challenges associated with establishing the SKA Regional Centre network.
Link to PDF (may not be available yet): I2-1.pdf