Higher Degree by Research Application Portal

Science is becoming increasingly data intensive and this requires a new data focused approach. The prime example is the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project, one of the world’s latest large-scale global scientific endeavours, which will be co-hosted in Australia and is set to produce orders of magnitude more data than all of mankind’s past accomplishments. Just one of the SKA phase-1 science projects (e.g. the HI survey) will produce derived data in the order of several terabytes per second, and the second phase of the SKA project will be at least an order of magnitude greater.The project

This project in Data Intensive Astronomy will bridge the computer science-focused data-driven approach to the science applications. Data Intensive Science has become fundamental to deliver any modern-day cutting edge science, and this position bridges the technical issues and the astronomical requirements. The PhD projects will provide engagement with industry and other partners and a unique training environment, working at the cutting edge of radio astronomy, computer science and commercial business and scientific systems.

The Computer Science element will cover: profiling basic algorithms to measure various compute metrics and creating data slicing helper functions based on information derived from measured metrics; characterisation of the transitions between compute intense and I/O intense phases, the balancing of these being central to getting the best performance. Supervision will primarily be by Prof. Wicenec.

The practical aspect will be to work on some of the most extreme datasets observed in Radio Astronomy to date, which will provide a perfect test bed for the data-driven paradigm. The data we will use will come from the Australian SKA Pathfinder project, DINGO. The student will investigate the ideas and methods, demonstrating new approaches on frontier data products. Supervision will primarily be by Dr. Dodson.

Professor Andreas Wicenec | andreas.wicenec@uwa.edu.au

Director, Data Intensive Astronomy

We are interested to hear from potential candidates from any STEM background, as the range of skill sets required (and to be developed) can not be limited to one traditional field of study. The candidate would join an active multi-disciplinary group with many scientific and commercial cross fertilisation possibilities.

The Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) is a program of independent, supervised research that is assessed solely on the basis of a thesis, sometimes including a creative work component, that is examined externally. The work presented for a PhD must be a substantial and original contribution to scholarship, demonstrating mastery of the subject of interest as well as an advance in that field of knowledge. 

Visit the course webpage for full details of this course including admission requirements, course rules and the relevant CRICOS code/s.