SKA OBSERVATORY TAPS THE SERVER LABS FOR HIGH-PERFORMANCE CLOUD COMPUTING PLATFORM
THE SERVER LABS SELECTED TO BUILD CLOUD HIGH-PERFORMANCE COMPUTING ENVIRONMENT FOR SKA OBSERVATORY
Cloud infrastructure specialist The Server Labs has been selected by the SKA Observatory (SKAO) to develop an Amazon Web Services (AWS) hosted high-performance computing environment that will support software development and testing for one of the world’s most ambitious scientific projects.
The SKAO is leading an international effort to construct the largest radio telescope arrays ever built, designed to unlock new insights into the origins and evolution of the universe. The network will ultimately consist of 197 dish antennas in South Africa and more than 131,000 dipole antennas in Western Australia, creating an unprecedented global instrument for deep-space observation.
Once fully operational, the telescope arrays are expected to generate and archive around 700 petabytes of scientific data every year — volumes comparable to some of the world’s largest data ecosystems. Early scientific operations are expected to begin within the next few years.
To support the development phase of the project, SKAO engineers require a highly flexible computing environment capable of modelling different hardware configurations and processing architectures as the telescope’s complex software systems evolve.
The Server Labs worked closely with SKAO engineers to design and deploy a secure and scalable high-performance computing (HPC) environment using AWS ParallelCluster. The cloud-based platform provides on-demand access to a range of computing configurations, allowing engineers to rapidly test performance, run simulations and refine algorithms.
The SKA Observatory’s technical challenge centres on the development of advanced signal-processing algorithms capable of extracting faint astronomical signals from vast volumes of data captured by thousands of antennas across two continents.
Achieving this requires extensive testing and optimisation across multiple computing architectures, from high-performance CPUs to GPU-accelerated systems.
By leveraging an elastic cloud infrastructure, engineers are able to dynamically scale computing resources, switch between instance types and benchmark different hardware configurations without the constraints of traditional on-premise computing environments.
The environment also enables rapid cluster creation and teardown to support continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) workflows, allowing development teams to conduct large-scale performance testing at high frequency. High-bandwidth, low-latency networking and parallel file systems provide the speed required for intensive computational workloads.
The Server Labs was chosen following a competitive procurement process to deliver the cloud computing environment and provide SKAO engineers with secure access to AWS infrastructure for development and testing activities.
Dolores Saiz, CEO of The Server Labs, said the scale and complexity of modern scientific research increasingly depends on adaptable computing environments.
“The computational demands of next generation scientific missions require development environments that can evolve as rapidly as the algorithms and requirements themselves.
“We are proud to support the SKAO by designing this environment so their teams has the flexibility to experiment, benchmark and optimise at scale, ensuring they can make informed decisions during the development lifecycle.”
The partnership reflects the growing importance of high-performance cloud computing in large-scale research projects, where flexible infrastructure can accelerate development cycles and enable rapid experimentation.
Now marking its 20th year, The Server Labs has built a reputation for delivering cloud infrastructure solutions for compute-intensive and highly regulated sectors. The company has worked with organisations including the European Space Agency and Genomics England, helping them design and manage large-scale cloud environments.
As scientific research, artificial intelligence and data-driven innovation continue to expand computational requirements, demand for scalable high-performance computing platforms is accelerating across sectors ranging from life sciences and healthcare to financial services and space exploration.
With expertise across AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, The Server Labs aims to position itself at the centre of this shift, helping organisations build the computing infrastructure needed to support the next generation of scientific discovery and commercial innovation.
