The International Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Organisation is calling for design proposals for the pre-construction phase of the project.
The pre-construction phase will run until the end of 2016, and during this phase the telescope architecture will be designed and the requirements for all of the sub-systems will be determined.
"The overall aim of this phase is to deliver detailed designs and blueprints for the SKA facility to go out to tender for construction," said a statement from the SKA.
According to the SKA Organisation, the request for proposals (RFP) is "an invitation for international consortia to bid for work packages to design the various components of the SKA, such as antennas, receivers, signal processing systems, data transport and high-performance computers".
"SKA South Africa is positioned to play a prominent role in responding to this request because of the expertise contained in the SKA South Africa project team, and because of the involvement of SA industry in the development and delivery of the MeerKAT telescope," says SKA SA.
"The MeerKAT engineering team and local industries have been in discussions with their international peers to form consortia that will respond to the RFP."
SKA SA says it is also in the process of finalising a subsidy programme to assist local industry and institutions to participate in this preparatory phase of the SKA.
The programme will be implemented on a shared risk basis. SKA SA says this is "in order to develop the expertise, competency and know how to be internationally competitive in bidding for SKA contracts when the telescope is built".
The SKA SA Web site will be updated this week with further information on the RFPs and participation. Meanwhile, the RFP documentation is available at: www.skatelescope.org/publications/request-for-proposals.
Respondents are requested, but not required, to register their intent to submit a proposal within the next two weeks. All proposals are to be submitted to the SKA Organisation by 10 June.
Big data challenge
In May last year, it was announced that a 'dual site' decision had been made, which would see the 500 000 antennas of the SKA project (the world's largest radio telescope) scattered across both Southern Africa and Australia. Construction is expected to begin in 2017 and conclude in 2024.
Once completed, the SKA will collect data from deep space which is expected to date back to the 'Big Bang'. The aperture arrays and dishes of the SKA are expected to produce 10 times the volume of current global Internet traffic.
Earlier this month, it was announced that scientists from SKA SA would join IBM and the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON) in a four-year collaboration to research new computing systems to deal with the big data challenge posed by the SKA.
The collaboration, dubbed the DOME project, is a public-private partnership launched by IBM and ASTRON last year in order to investigate emerging technologies for large-scale and efficient exascale computing for the SKA.
The SKA SA scientists will specifically be focusing on signal processing and advanced computing algorithms for the capture and analysis of SKA data. They are also developing rugged or 'desert-proof' microservers which will be able to withstand extreme environmental conditions.
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