Optimising NGAS for the MWA Archive

Abstract

The Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) is a next-generation radio telescope, generating visibility data products continuously at about 400 MB/s. Efficiently managing and archiving this data is a challenge. The MWA Archive consists of dataflows and storage sub-systems distributed across three tiers. At its core is the open source software - the Next-Generation Archive System (NGAS) - that was initially developed in ESO. However, to meet the MWA data challenge, we have tailored and optimised NGAS to achieve high-throughput data ingestion, efficient dataflow management, multi-tiered data storage and processing-aware data staging.