Performance evaluation of an integrated RFI database for the MeerKAT/SKA radio telescope

Balekaki, Gerald Nathan and Kuttel, Michelle and Berman, Sonia and Blyth, Sarah and Schroeder, Anja (2020) Performance evaluation of an integrated RFI database for the MeerKAT/SKA radio telescope, Proceedings of Annual Conference of the South African Institute for Computer Scientists and Information Technologists (SAICSIT 2020), 14-16 September 2020, Cape Town, South Africa, Association for Computing Machinery.

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Abstract

For radio telescopes, radio frequency interference from terrestrial and other sources is a recognized problem that contaminates the signal (RFI) and must be tracked and ultimately removed. At the MeerKAT/SKA telescope, RFI is recorded with a variety of devices, including telescopes, sensors, and scanners; but the combination of data from these multiple sources to yield a unified view of RFI remains a challenging problem. Previously, we demonstrated that a scalable database model with an implementation based on the Polystore framework is a potential solution for RFI monitoring. Here we extend this work, implementing the database model in an integrated environment and evaluating its performance across a range of workloads with three data stores: SciDB, PSQL, and Accumulo. We find that SciDB and Accumulo scale better than PSQL under multi-user environments. Results show a minimal latency as low as 0.02 seconds, irrespective of the location, and data store type. Further, integrated APIs provide single notation and are 5% faster than third-party APIs. Our findings thus provide a guide to the proposed integrated RFI system at MeerKAT/SKA radio telescope.

Item Type: Conference paper
Subjects: Information systems > Data management systems > Database management system engines
Applied computing > Physical sciences and engineering > Astronomy
Date Deposited: 11 Aug 2020 11:46
Last Modified: 11 Aug 2020 11:46
URI: http://pubs.cs.uct.ac.za/id/eprint/1383

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