Cloud and/or HPC in the 2020s: Risks, Opportunities and the SKA Project

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Project will shortly embark on the construction of the World’s largest radio astronomy observatory with locations on three continents. The SKA is, among other things, a large and complex IT project with numerous challenges to look forward to including the capture of petabits of raw data being produced 24/7, which will then be processed into hundreds of petabytes of science data products per annum for distribution to a worldwide user community to carry out further post-processing and analysis.
The talk will briefly review the SKA’s computing requirements and then how developments in ICT in the 2020s look set to pan out and the impact these may have. The talk will close with an attempt to prognosticate on the long-term (survival?) prospects of the HPC industry as cloud computing grows ever more ubiquitous.