Speakers
Description
The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescopes, currently under construction in South Africa and Australia, are due to enter Science Verification at the end of 2026. The SKA Regional Centre Network (SRCNet) is federating distributed, heterogenous regional centres into a coherent global infrastructure to store and process SKAO data. This contribution presents the distributed computing challenges of the SRCNet project, introducing the software stack for distributed, federated computing, focusing on the deployment and operation of PanDA as the workload management system.
We describe the role of the Global Execution API (GE API) as the SRCNet abstraction layer between user workflows and site-level execution backends, and outline the core stack comprising PanDA, the GE API, and federated identity and access management (IAM). We also describe SRCNet’s use of the Site Capabilities service as a lightweight alternative to centrally curated resource catalogues such as CRIC.
We report on deployment progress, lessons learned, current limitations, and next steps (particularly, integration with federated data management) in the context of evolving toward production-ready distributed execution for early SKA science.