A distributed computing infrastructure for LOFAR Italian community

Abstract: The LOw-Frequency ARray is a low-frequency radio interferometer composed by observational stations spread across Europe and it is the largest precursor of SKA in terms of effective area and generated data rates. In 2018, the Italian community officially joined LOFAR project, and it deployed a distributed computing and storage infrastructure dedicated to LOFAR data analysis. The infrastructure is based on 4 nodes distributed in different Italian locations and it offers services for pipelines execution, storage of final and intermediate results and support for the use of the software and infrastructure. As the analysis of the LOw-Frequency ARray data requires a very complex computational procedure, a container-based approach has been adopted to distribute software environments to the different computing resources. A science platform approach is used to facilitate interactive access to computational resources. In this paper, we describe the architecture and main features of the infrastructure.