The SKA observatory (SKAO) will provide scientists with a wide variety of data of a quality and quantity that goes far beyond anything currently provided by radio observatories.
To prepare the scientific community, data challenges between scientific teams around the world are organized. For the second edition of the SKA Data Challenges (SDC), a French team led by Observatoire de Paris - PSL with CNRS, Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur and several French universities won the gold medal in the competition on GENCI/IDRIS's Jean Zay machine. The second edition of this challenge, SKADC2, was a new step for the whole community to learn together about the joint efforts to be undertaken.
GENCI is extremely proud to have participated by providing accelerated computing resources from the #JeanZay supercomputer - one of France's three national supercomputers - to 5 teams involved in the challenge, in a coordinated manner with expert support from IDRIS/Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) and Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur!
The MINERVA team from Observatoire de Paris | PSL with the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) and partners from the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics and the Strasbourg Astronomical Observatory, won the challenge after using an innovative approach based on machine learning performed on the GENCI-IDRIS/Centre national de la recherche scientifique supercomputer.
"While 1,000 hours of GPU computing resources have been allocated by IDRIS to the MINERVA project to enable the development of a machine learning method to better meet the needs of astronomical images, this success heralds very promising future developments between HPC/IA and large-scale scientific instruments as part of the SKA project, in line with GENCI's strategic plan," says Philippe Lavocat, President and CEO of GENCI.