Seeing too much, China's Sky Eye poses a problem for scientists

"The main challenge facing the China Sky Eye is the huge amount of data it collects." On December 1, Li Di, chief scientist of FAST, said in an interview with Science and Technology Daily that normal operating funding can only meet the basic data storage, archiving and computing needs of the China Sky Eye, while more effective transmission and data mining currently rely heavily on the input of resources from various scientific research groups. Li Di said that building a more effective sharing platform and conducting in-depth mining of the China Sky Eye data will surely produce more important scientific results.

The world's largest single-aperture radio telescope, the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST), was completed and put into use on September 25, 2016. Photo by Xinhua News Agency reporter Ou Dongqu

It is reported that the "China Sky Eye" has detected the world's largest sample of fast radio burst events and has become the world's most powerful pulsar search tool. Its major achievements were also selected as the top ten scientific advances in the world by Nature and Science magazines in 2020. With the help of the "China Sky Eye" observation, the Chinese scientific research team has become the core research force in the field of international fast radio bursts.

With the deepening of detection, the "China Sky Eye" has discovered at least 6 new fast radio burst sources through the multi-science target drift scanning joint survey project, including a very active new repeating fast radio burst. In particular, after the first fast radio burst in the Milky Way was discovered by Canadian and American scientists, the "China Sky Eye" carried out important follow-up research and published a strict restriction on the radio flux accompanying its high-energy burst in the journal Nature. This discovery makes magnetars the most promising celestial body for the origin of fast radio bursts.

In addition to the discovery of fast radio bursts, the "China Sky Eye" has developed complete neutral hydrogen processing imaging software and completed the calibration of polarization measurements, which has enabled the "China Sky Eye" to reach the world's leading level in the quality of its observations of interstellar magnetic fields, and has begun to produce results in basic frontier systems of radio astronomy such as supernova remnants.

However, along with the observation comes a huge amount of scientific data. Currently, the "China Sky Eye" generates about 20PB of scientific data each year. In the future, if the "FAST array" is completed, my country will build another 5 "China Sky Eyes", and the amount of scientific data will be even more astonishing.

"We will give full play to the unique data resources of the national heavy equipment 'China Sky Eye' and the dual advantages of the Guiyang Gui'an super-large data center cluster to build an internationally leading FAST scientific computing center and build a FAST pilot array and a national open cloud platform for data." Earlier, in an interview with the media, Wu Hongchun, deputy commander of the Digital Economy Command of the Guiyang Gui'an "Strengthening the Provincial Capital" Action Leading Group, revealed that Guizhou will build an internationally influential FAST astronomical data industry innovation base. By then, Guiyang Gui'an can fully undertake the storage needs of the "China Sky Eye" scientific research data, widely gather astronomical data from Beijing, Nanjing, Lanzhou and other places, build a cross-regional, cross-departmental, and cross-field computing resource scheduling system, and carry out joint scientific research and exchanges and cooperation in frontier cross-cutting fields such as astronomical data cleaning and processing, model algorithms, analysis and processing, and industrial collaboration.

Source: Science and Technology Daily

◎ Science and Technology Daily reporter He Xinghui

Editor: Zhang Qiqi

Review: Julie

Final review: Liu Haiying