AENEAS has been funded by Horizon 2020, the research and innovation programme of the European Union. The project ran from January 2017 until December 2019 and received EUR 2,99 million of EU funding.
As the project recently ended, we have asked Michiel van Haarlem, the coordinator of the project and Head of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Office at ASTRON in the Netherlands, to tell us more on the achievements of the project.
What was the first and primary objective of AENEAS?
The SKA will be the world’s largest radio telescope once completed later this decade. Construction of its two components, SKA-low in Western Australia and SKA-mid in South Africa, is due to start in 2021. The telescopes will be producing vast amounts of astronomical data – of order 2 Petabit (1 Petabit= 1015) per second of raw data. The first stage of processing takes place close to the telescopes. Data products will then be distributed to around fifteen SKA Regional Centres in the SKA Member countries. Although much reduced from the raw data rate, we are still talking about transporting and storing around 600 Petabytes of new data per year.
The main goal of the AENEAS project was to produce a preliminary design of the network of SKA Regional Centres (SRCs) that we must build in the coming years in order to be ready for the data stream once the telescope becomes operational. Having these regional centres ready on time is critical to getting the eagerly awaited scientific results such as tests of Einstein’s theory of relativity and studying the signals from the first stars and galaxies that formed after the Big Bang.
We investigated many different aspects of the design of the regional centres: not just the computing, data storage and networking requirements and solutions, but also the governance questions on how to organise, fund and set-up this collaboration which will involve many partners. Dealing with the SKA data volumes is also likely to bring about changes in the way astronomers work, so we also studied how users can interact with the data and how we can prepare them for these changes.
What are the concrete benefits & impacts of the project for the European scientific & research community?
The AENEAS project has made significant progress on many fronts. It has brought together the organisations that will be involved in developing and ultimately running the regional centres – not just in Europe, but also globally. The technical workpackages have identified solutions (in software and in hardware) that will be adopted and further developed in the coming years. We now also have a better idea of the costs involved in transporting, storing and processing the data, as well as the personnel costs of supporting users and running the network of regional centres.
By engaging with funding agencies and national observatories we have also been able to discuss important organisational and governance aspects. We have benefited from the experience gained by other pan-European projects, in particular the Worldwide Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid (WLCG) which is a global collaboration that provides computing resources for CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) Regional Centres that support users of the ALMA telescope in Chile. There are clear benefits to having compute and data intensive projects collaborate and share both physical resources as well as expertise and software tools.
Is EU funding important for the European research? How has it contributed to AENEAS success?
The SKA project is a global collaboration, so work on preparing and developing the SRC concept is also underway elsewhere. However, AENEAS was the first dedicated project and has led the way in exploring the full range of issues to be solved. This has increased its impact significantly. The EU funding for AENEAS has helped European countries that were interested but not yet members, to join the SKA. Many of the AENEAS partners are now also involved in the Horizon 2020 project ESCAPE, one of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) Cluster projects. ESCAPE brings together large research infrastructures in the fields of astronomy, particle physics and astro-particle physics, which opens up fascinating opportunities for multi-messenger discoveries with telescopes that detect electromagnetic radiation, gravitational waves, neutrinos and cosmic rays.