SDP AA0.5 System

Who?

AA Operators: AIV Engineers, Commissioning Scientists 

What 

Minimal SDP system, integrated with SKA Software deployed to enable engineering and science commissioning test for the first SKA Array Assembly (AA 0.5).

Expected to provide:

• A well-defined way to start and manage the state of the SDP system (using a standardised approach shared with the rest of SKA software)
• The ability to capture visibility data from the correlator beamformer (CBF) (visibility receive workflow)
• The ability to generate calibration solutions for a single tied array beam and provide those solutions for other telescope systems, ie the CBF (RCAL workflow) 
• The ability to capture data and evaluate pointing offsets for the MID telescope
• The ability to monitor data being captured (QA metrics & displays)

Why?

The first SKA Array assembly is a critical milestone on the way to building the telescope and 1) needs a minimal SDP system to enable a number of the planned engineering and science commissioning tests, and 2) Integrating and testing an early version of SDP alongside this system will greatly help reduce the number of risks and help drive further development of the system for the next Array Assembly (AA1).

Notes:

Program Epic for the development of the SDP system intended to be deployed and integrated for use with MID and LOW Array Assembly 0.5.

Exact requirements and use cases for this system are still in development but to first order AA0.5 is expected to have similar tests and requirements to AA1 (defined in system CDR documentation) just with a slightly smaller and less mature system and less complete set of tests.

ECPs which detail the current plan for AA0.5 can be found here:

• MID: https://confluence.skatelescope.org/display/CMI/ECP-200014+-+Mid+AA0.5 
• LOW: https://confluence.skatelescope.org/display/CMI/ECP-200011+-+Array+Release+0.5+for+LOW 

Use cases for the SDP AA0.5 system are also being developed here: https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_l8jDuXg=/

While AA0.5 is not anticipated to be ready for full system testing involving SDP until Q1/Q2 2023 the aim is to front-load the development of the SDP element of this as much as possible as to not impact the development of SDP for future Array Assemblies or the development of SDP workflows which become considerably more challenging to deliver from AA2/3 onwards.