2026-11-04 –, Banquet Hall
Astronomy is firmly entrenched in the big data era, with modern surveys routinely generating terabyte-scale image cubes. The visualisation and inspection of these massive datasets present significant challenges—bottlenecks that will only intensify with the advent of petabyte-scale facilities such as the SKA, ngVLA, and LSST. The Cube Analysis and Rendering Tool for Astronomy (CARTA) was developed to overcome these barriers. CARTA’s client/server architecture empowers scientists to remotely inspect massive datasets in situ, operating with a memory footprint far smaller than the original data size. In this talk, I will outline the specific challenges associated with visualising TB-scale image cubes and demonstrate how CARTA achieves smooth, interactive inspection along different dimensions. This is achieved, in part, by converting standard FITS files into a collection of datasets (currently saved in HDF5 format) tailored for efficient data retrieval. For instance, CARTA enables rapid spectral inspection by generating a "rotated" dataset optimised for reading along the frequency axis. I will discuss existing and planned solutions to further optimise the FITS-to-HDF5 conversion process, significantly reducing the time required to deliver inspection-ready data. Finally, I will highlight ongoing efforts to implement a multi-server architecture to visualise datasets stored in different locations across the globe.
Marcin Sokolowski holds a Master's degree (1998) and a Ph.D. (2008) in Physics from the University of Warsaw and the National Centre for Nuclear Research, respectively. Prior to his Ph.D., he worked for five years as a senior software programmer. He began his astronomy career developing algorithms for the "Pi of the Sky" robotic telescope network before moving to Australia in 2012 to transition into radio astronomy. Marcin has extensive experience at the intersection of science and engineering, and has contributed to several projects ranging from Epoch of Reionisation experiments and MWA operations, to the testing and verification of SKA-Low prototype stations. In 2025, he joined AusSRC as a support scientist, optimising the CARTA visualisation software for massive datasets from existing and future telescopes and working on the SRCNet project to deliver science-ready SKA data to researchers across the globe. His research focuses on Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs), pulsars, and other low-frequency transients, and over the last few years he has been leading the development of a novel GPU-based pipeline for image-based FRB searches.