Dr Paulus Lahur1
1CSIRO, Clayton, Australia
The Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) is a radio telescope array located at Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO) in Western Australia. It is part of Australia Telescope National Facility (ATNF), which is operated and managed by the Space and Astronomy (S&A) business unit of CSIRO. The data from the telescope is ingested and processed using ASKAPsoft, which is a suite of software developed by our computing team. Some parts of the software that are useful for non-ASKAP processing have been released as an open source software called Yandasoft. Both Yandasoft and ASKAPsoft are designed to run on high-performance computing environment. ASKAP relies heavily on computing facilities in Pawsey Centre. Currently we are in the middle of transition process from a machine called Galaxy to a new one called Setonix.
During this transition, we are also trialling the use of container technology for development and deployment. Docker is used to create the container image, and Singularity is used for its deployment on the target machine. During the deployment of Yandasoft for end users, this strategy has been very useful in simplifying the entire process. For the adoption of the container technology within the development process, however, the experience has been quite a mix. Extracting computing performance as much as possible turns out to be a challenging exercise, whether directly on bare metal or in a container. In this presentation, we would like to share this experience and the lessons learned along the way.
Biography:
The author is currently a staff in Scientific Computing team in Information Management and Technology (IMT) of CSIRO, working with the ASKAP team.