Case Study: International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) achieves a scalable, maintainable SKA software framework with ThoughtWorks

ICRAR - Customer Case Study

ThoughtWorks partnered with the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) to help tackle the software and collaboration challenges of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) — a globally distributed radio‑telescope project that will generate unprecedented data volumes (up to petabits per second before reduction) and involve teams across many countries. The core problems were coordinating large, interdependent scopes of work among dispersed contributors and creating reliable, maintainable software and infrastructure capable of very high throughput, distributed processing and advanced visualization.

ThoughtWorks applied Agile and Open Source practices and tooling—automation of environment setup, build/test/deploy, GitHub for collaboration, continuous integration, automated regression testing, and scaled communication rituals—while delivering proof‑of‑concepts such as BOINC-based processing, Stellarium/SVMT visualization adaptations, and deployment scripts for cloud and server setups. The engagement produced working prototypes, repeatable developer environments and processes that speed onboarding, increase maintainability and enable global collaboration, providing a practical framework and tools to support SKA precursor projects and the next design phases.

ICRAR