SKAO awards The Server Labs an AWS cloud development contract

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The SKAO is a global collaboration to build the largest radio telescope arrays in the world, made up of 197 dish antennas in South Africa and 131,072 dipole antennas in Western Australia. 

Due to begin early scientific operations within the next few years, the telescopes will expand understanding of the universe and when complete will archive around 700 petabytes of data annually.

During the development phase, the SKAO requires a flexible computing environment capable of rapidly adapting to different hardware configurations and performance requirements.

The Server Labs worked with the SKAO team to architect and deploy a secure, elastic high-performance compute environment using AWS Parallel Cluster, giving SKAO engineers on-demand access to flexible compute environments. 

The SKAO’s engineering challenge involves the development and tuning of highly complex signal processing algorithms. Extracting coherent astronomical signals requires sophisticated algorithmic processing and extensive iterative testing across different compute architectures.

By leveraging an elastic cloud-based high-performance compute environment, SKAO engineers can rapidly switch between different instance configurations, test performance and refine algorithms.

The environment enables rapid cluster builds and teardowns for CI/CD pipelines and access to varied CPU and GPU hardware configurations. It allows large-scale, high-frequency cluster testing using high-bandwidth, low-latency interconnects and parallel file systems.

TSL was selected following a competitive procurement process to provide the SKAO with access to AWS for this development and testing environment.

Dolores Saiz, CEO of The Server Labs, commented: “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.”

Now celebrating its 20th year, The Server Labs brings two decades of experience in cloud infrastructure in compute intensive and regulated environments.

The Server Labs’ track record spans organisations with national-scale impact, including the European Space Agency and Genomics England. As demand for high-performance compute continues to grow, accelerated by the mainstream adoption of AI, The Server Labs is helping organisations across life sciences, space, financial services, and healthcare to architect, secure, and optimise cloud environments at scale.

With proven expertise across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud platforms and a two-decade track record of delivery, The Server Labs is well positioned to support organisations as they build the computational capabilities required for the next generation of scientific and commercial innovation.