LOFAR LTA Development Meeting

30 Jun 2026, 12:30 → 2 Jul 2026, 13:30 Europe/Amsterdam

SURF Utrecht

The meeting provides a forum for LTA sites and the LOFAR Observatory team to discuss and align on upcoming needs and future development plans. In particular, we expect the agenda for this meeting to include:

• LOFAR2.0 data management: community data management plans, expected LTA usage patterns, in-archive data processing.
• LTA expansion: possible new sites, onboarding processing, service commitments.
• Future development: what are our ambitions for the future of the LOFAR data system? How should we evolve our technology stack towards them? Is there opportunity for alignment with SKA SRCNet or other major infrastructures?

 

There is also an open call for participants to propose other relevant topics for discussion.

 

Representatives of current and prospective future LTA sites are warmly invited join, as are others working on the development, operation, or management of the LOFAR archive. Please register your participation before 23 June.

 

If you are joining remotely, please use Microsoft Teams with the following meeting IDs:

 

Day 1 (30 June): 354 079 205 041 38

Day 2 (1 July): 377 155 411 013 351

Day 3 (2 July): 391 920 072 965 587

 

Passwords will be distributed to registered participants by e-mail. Please get in touch if you are unable to connect.

LTA Site Requirements (SDC-038)

Tuesday 30 June

12:30 Lunch

1 Welcome and logistics

• Aims for this meeting.
• Thanks to SURF for hosting.
• Local facilities, where to find coffee,
  etc.
• Confirm plans for a group dinner.

Speakers: John Swinbank (ASTRON), Natalie Danzei

2 LOFAR2 Science Operations: Schedule, Policies & Requirements

• The current status of LOFAR2.0 construction
• Timeline to operations
• Resource needs
• Data management plans
• Data retirement
• Federated vs centralized processing

Speaker: Roberto Pizzo

3 LOFAR2 LTA System Architecture & Technical Requirements

• What services are we putting in place to address the LOFAR2.0 needs?
• User data ingest, data processing, ...
• How is software being deployed and versioned?
• What is needed from data centres to make them possible?
• Are there outstanding issues regarding system access, availability, ... that we need to address?

Speaker: Hanno Holties

4 Data Processing Pipelines

• What types of pipeline are needed for LOFAR2?
• How are pipelines being developed and selected?
• How will pipelines be supported & maintained?
• Use of accelerator hardware (e.g. GPUs)

Speaker: John Swinbank (ASTRON)

15:30 Coffee

5 Discussion: Making LOFAR2.0 Possible

• Based on earlier presentations, what are the key topics that need to be clarified from the point of view of the LTA sites?
• Are there capabilities that some or all of the LTA sites will find hard to make available for LOFAR2?
• Answer the questions we can now; otherwise, builb a list of topics that need further discussion or investigation over the remainder of the meeting.

Speaker: John Swinbank (ASTRON)

Wednesday 1 July

6 Site update: PCSS

• Current status
• Future developments that might impact LTA development or operations (e.g. hardware or technology changes)

7 Site Update: FZJ

10:30 Coffee

8 Site Update: SURF

9 Round Table: Integration between storage and computing

integration approaches among storage site (LTA plus online storage) and cloud computing / HPC computing environment. There are for sure various ideas / views across centers that depend on their local situation, the architecture of their compute clusters and their current level of storage/compute integration. We imaging that one as the round-table / brainstorming kind of session...

Speaker: Maciej Brzezniak

12:30 Lunch

10 LENSS

• What is the LENSS project?
• What does the LTA need to do to support it?

Speaker: Ilse van Bemmel

11 Future Ambitions for the Radio Astronomy Community

Beyond LOFAR2.0, what are the additional services the LOFAR community needs?

• User pipelines
• Science platform
• Improved data discovery
• VO interfaces
• ...

What projects is ASTRON working on to help realize these? What sort of roadmap might we expect?

Speaker: John Swinbank (ASTRON)

12 SRCNet Status Update

• What is SRCNet?
• What facilities will it provide to the SKAO community?
• How is development being organized?
• What is its current state and anticipated timeline?

Speaker: Janneke de Boer

13 The RADIO Collaboration: A common architecture for radio astronomy?

Speaker: Hanno Holties

15:30 Coffee

14 Discussion: Future Goals

We heard a lot about ambitions from ASTRON and the radio astronomy community this afternoon. We should discuss:

• What other opportunities are there?
• How can we realize these goals?
• What blockers or challenges do we need to address?

Thursday 2 July

15 Planning for New LTA Sites

• What do new sites need to do to join the LTA?
• What do ASTRON and/or existing sites need to do to facilitate that process?
• Plenty of time for Q&A from meeting participants.

Speaker: Hanno Holties

10:30 Coffee

16 Discussion Time

• Extra discussion space for matters that have come up during the meeting.
• Agree action items.
• Plans for future meetings.

12:30 Lunch