Science Opportunities and Challenges Associated with SKA Big Data

Abstract: The upcoming Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope will become the largest astronomical observation facility, and is expected to introduce revolutionary changes in major fields of natural sciences. These revolutionary changes help us to answer the fundamental questions related to the origins of the universe, life, cosmic magnetic field, the nature of gravity, and to search for extraterrestrial civilizations. The unprecedented power of the SKA is characterized by an extremely high sensitivity, wide field of view, ultra-fast survey speed, and ultra-high time, space, frequency resolutions, which ensures that SKA will have a leading position in radio astronomy in future; this will be accompanied by a vast amount of observational data at exabyte (EB) level. The transportation, storage, reading, writing, computation, curation, and archiving of the SKA-level data and the release of SKA science products are posing serious challenges to the field of information communication technology (ICT). The China SKA science team will work together with the information, communication and computer industries to tackle the challenges associated with the SKA big data, which will not only promote major original scientific discoveries, but also apply the obtained technological achievements for stimulating the national economy.