The SKA radio telescope uses a variety of collector types, including approximately 2500 dishes distributed with separations

up to a few thousand kilometres, and about 250 aperture array (AA) stations located within 200 km of the core. The data rates associated with each individual collector are vast: around 10 GBytes/s for each dish and 2 TBytes/s for an AA station. As each of these must be connected directly to a central correlator, designing a costeffective cabling and trenching infrastructure presents a great engineering challenge.

2400 dishes with individual datarate of 10 Gbytes/s

180 km

magnification

Parameter Name Trench Cable (1 tube)

Value (k / km) 12 0.85 1.2 2.05 2.7 5.1

Bandwdith (Gbytes / s) 160 2*160 6*160 9*160 24*160

CableType 1 CableType 2 CableType 6 CableType 9 CableType 24

495.5 km 321.1 km 547.0 km 113.6 km 59.6 km

Cable (2 tubes) Cable (6 tubes) Cable (9 tubes) Cable (24 tubes)

20972.88 k (Total Cost)

= 18433.86(trench) + 2539.022(cable)
2.5 km

A 1

Cost map
A

Penalty map
Cost-effective infrastructure in a multi-antenna telescope layout, G.Grigorescu et al. , DOI 10.1007/ s10686-009-9177-2 Underwater path planning using fast marching algorithms, Petres, Pailhas, et al. , Oceans 2005 - Europe Vol 2, ISBN 0-7803-9103-9

2 4 9 1 1

Least penalty corridor

B B

Direct path = 101.25 Optimised path = 44.5

Every pixels color coding is the least total penalty for reaching both A and B from that particular pixel.

Gabriel Grigorescu Tel: +44 (0)1223 761661 Email: gabriel@mrao.cam.ac.uk

Trespassing penalty per pixel = 1 unit everywhere except the obstacle