Challenges of Big Radio Data Processing

As radio telescopes, and their data products, become larger and more sophisticated, so do the challenges of moving, storing, processing, and analyzing those data products. In this chapter, we briefly describe the origins and behaviour of several different computational challenges in radio astronomy. We start with the causes of the scaling towards ever larger data volumes, discuss the software landscape in radio astronomy, and give an overview of some of the major steps of radio data processing and the nature of their computing overheads. We also present some of the unique computational challenges associated with very long baseline interferometry, and those arising from full-polarization processing of radio data.