Comment by wtcactus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wtcactus | Hacker News Reader

Disclaimer. I work for the SKA.

This article is totally wrong in some many ways, that I'm just dumbfounded. I think this was written by some AI that has no clue about reality.

Allow me to correct just a few points:

1st. China is a latecomer to the project. In fact, while they officially joined, they have very little presence on the build process. There are presently no Chinese teams working along the rest of them on the Observatory.

2nd. SKAMPI is (was) an internal technology to setup an integration ground for the work from the various teams on the SKA Observatory. It was deprecated about 6 months ago, because it was just unmaintainable (the teams were constantly breaking it). I don't understand where they got the name from, because it has absolutely nothing to do with the name. No, the SKA telescopes are not "known as SKAMPI". There was a collaboration known as "SKAMP" though, maybe that was mentioned somewhere, and it all got mixed up.

3rd. The telescopes are located in South Africa and Australia, and the headquarters where we centralise the monitoring and control in the UK.

4th. It's not driven by docker, that's just silly. The build and integration process mostly runs on 2 Kubernetes clusters. The image build process was made in house so that it's mostly automated by GitLab pipelines we created. The teams only have to submit the code, tag a release, and the pipeline builds and publishes all the artefacts for them. The controlling resides at the antennas (in this case for the Mid telescopes) also in a k8s cluster that orchestrates the various services we need.

I'm really appalled at the terrible reporting here.

EDIT: On 2. Seems like this was now adopted. A collab with Max Planck Institute, that was sometimes abbreviated as SKA-MPI, now (as of 24th of January) became SKAMPI (using the same name as the deprecated integration platform).

I'd guess the Reg got SKAMPI from the page they link to on the SKAO's own website, dated 24th Jan. this year:

https://www.skao.int/en/news/512/ska-mid-prototype-dish-crea...

No idea where the the Docker mention comes from - the other SKAO link they reference mentions Kubernetes.

Thank you for that. We were talking about this internally just now.

A team member from South Africa was just talking referring the collaboration with Max Plank Institute here, hence the name (which was SKA-MPI, and just now became SKAMPI). This is a new thing.

Other people are confused as well, since SKAMPI was the name used for the integration platform I mentioned before.

It's a fantastic project - I wish it and you every success!

Thank you. I'm very happy to be a part of it.

The kubecon talk was pretty interesting

https://youtu.be/quW8FbW1fVM?si=n-OdIdwdHUCJNQ10

Oh, you found that, thank you!

That talk gives a good high level overview of the platform we created on the observatory and that is now being used as a basis for the regional centres (where the data will be moved into and made accessible).

It's a nice talk from a more scientifically oriented point of view, but I think this one here describes better the platform we created: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEpa9ltz3Xg

> China is a latecomer to the project.

I remember reading somewhere that the project only became feasible because China came up with way to save on the construction costs of the telescopes (or something like that).

I don't think that's a real issue.

The innovation isn't happening on the Mid Dishes. This is well understood tech that's been around for several decades. There are some interesting advances in the Low antennas, but those are being built mostly by Italian companies.

I think - as general knowledge - that manufacturing in China usually saves in the cost. But that's not the big part of the budget.

> I think - as general knowledge - that manufacturing in China usually saves in the cost. But that's not the big part of the budget.

'General knowledge' is that it only saves significantly in cost if your willing to accept significantly lower quality.

If somehow it was figured out to make 'well understood tech that's been around for several decades' of the same quality, at a significantly lower cost, that's literally more important than probably every other innovation or contribution in the project.

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