Associated Professor Andrew Ensor – Director, New Zealand Square Kilometre Array Alliance (NZA).

(Featured image above: A/Prof Andrew Ensor speaking at Multicore World 2018)

 

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is the largest mega-Science and civil engineering project of the next decade -worldwide. The SKA presents some unprecedented computing challenges and NZA member organisations from academia and industry -with partial funding from New Zealand Government, have been tackling new problems in next generation computing since 2012. As New Zealand’s first venture in a mega-Project with lead design roles, it also represents numerous firsts for the country. Open Parallel is a founding member of the NZA, and Multicore World proudly support its efforts toward New Zealand’s full participation in the next phase of the construction of the SKA.

 

What’s next after six years of NZ’s participation in the SKA design

A/Prof Andrew Ensor

AUT University, Auckland, New Zealand

 

Abstract

The Square Kilometre Array is both the world’s largest mega-Science and its largest big data computing project. With long-term and ambitious scientific goals, and a growing number of member countries, it might be surprising to see New Zealand, as a founding member, still leads key parts of the computing work. The team recently completed six year’s design work for the SKA correlator, improvements on detecting and timing pulsars, supercomputing pipelines for generating images, and scalable middleware for operating a 260 PetaFLOP computer system. This talk will provide an update on the project’s status as phase one design wraps up, outline its computing and political challenges, and discuss some of its spillovers and next steps.

SLIDES

Wednesday 13th February 2019   11:35 am – 12:05 pm  – Schedule

 

Bio

Andrew is the Director of the High Performance Computing Research Laboratory at AUT. His research interests include HPC and GPU computing, distributed and mobile systems, algorithms, concurrency and computer graphics. Andrew is also the Director of the New Zealand SKA Alliance, a group of 35 New Zealand academic and industry partners that have worked over the past six years on the Exascale computer design for the Square Kilometre Array Project.

 

Andrew has been speaking at every edition of Multicore World since 2013