Case Study: International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) achieves rapid, scalable SKA data processing with Amazon Web Services (AWS)

International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) - Customer Case Study

The International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), a Curtin University and University of Western Australia joint venture in Perth, supports design work for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), which will produce astronomical image data at previously unimaginable scales (single images up to 600 TB; daily volumes potentially 500 TB–1 PB). To run preliminary experiments and process Pan‑STARRS1 galaxy images, ICRAR created the community computing project theSkyNet, but struggled to match physical server capacity to highly variable public volunteer compute loads in a cost‑effective, flexible way.

ICRAR moved theSkyNet to AWS—using Route 53, on‑demand EC2/AMIs, EBS, S3, Glacier and ELB—standing up the system in four days. The setup scaled to about 40 teraFLOPs, can process ~150 GB of sky images and store 400+ GB of imaging data per month, analyze 400–500 galaxies simultaneously, and absorb traffic spikes by adding capacity in hours, giving the team fast, elastic resources for SKA experiments.

International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR)

Kevin Vinsen

Research Associate Professor