Open and FAIR1 sharing of research data is essential to achieve the highest quality scientific results by enabling collaborations and peer-reviewing, as well as to maximise scientific output from research by lowering access to data and to data-analysis capabilities. These principles have recently seen a steep increase in attention for research in general. In the domain of astronomy, they have been appreciated and applied since a long time due to the need to investigate astronomical phenomena by combining data from widely varying astronomical instruments around the world and covering long periods of time. This has resulted in a culture of developing and applying open standards and openly sharing of data and software repositories. As such, radio astronomy now provides an example to guide the development of open data services in other research domains.

A distinguishing characteristic of radio astronomical research is the scale at which data is generated and processed. Developments in network and computational technology are opening up new opportunities for international and cross-domain exchange of data and expertise. At the same time, the technological developments also lead to an exponential increase in the data volumes produced by radio astronomical instruments and to the emergence of a generation of internationally distributed radio astronomical instruments such as the International Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) Telescope, and the Square Kilometer Array (SKA). This poses significant challenges that ASTRON addresses through international partnerships with both public and private organisations. Since the start of LOFAR operations, ASTRON has worked with ICT infrastructure partners such as SURFsara in the Netherlands, the Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany, and the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center in Poland, to develop a distributed data archive that is astronomical both in content and scale. A science datacenter for the SKA will push the radio astronomical data archives further into the exabyte scale2.

ASTRON is participating in the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) to apply the best practices developed within astronomy as well as to utilise services and infrastructure developed by other research organisations. The objective is to create a European-scale research datacenter that builds on the vast expertise and capabilities of the joint research community and supports cross-domain data and service sharing.

The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) provides access to a scalable computational infrastructure, supporting data storage and processing services for use by the international research community. ASTRON is participating in EOSC to develop and integrate services enabling the generation and utilisation of scientific data products. The components that form the building blocks for a European scale science datacenter include data archive access services, scientific processing workflow services, and research data repositories. A user portal is developed to provide low-threshold access to the underlying capabilities, by offering e.g. data mining capabilities, Virtual Observatory functionality, and processing pipelines running on integrated compute clusters.

Given the scale of data from instruments like LOFAR and SKA, and the complexity of the processing required to generate science ready data products, many researchers will benefit from getting access to high performing data infrastructure and high throughput processing capabilities without requiring them to organise resources or setting up complex software installations. To enable easy and portable deployment of software, ASTRON is developing container-based. Software installations as well as application images for data analysis pipelines are distributed across connected infrastructure. For the most data-intensive workflows, a user workspace is being realised for temporarily storage of data, e.g. to allow computational resources to become available for next steps in the processing workflow or to assess quality before ingesting data into an archive or a science data repository.