Building LOFAR as a Service

The LOFAR radio telescope is a low-frequency aperture synthesis radio telescope with headquarters in the Netherlands and stations across Europe. As a general purpose telescope, LOFAR produces petabytes of data each year serving a wide range of science cases. The data volumes produced are difficult or impossible to process on a single machine or even a small cluster at a scientific institute. We provide a layout for serving LOFAR processing to the astronomical community by providing access to LOFAR pipelines accelerated on a high throughput platform. We build this on our previous success with parallelizing the LOFAR Surveys pipeline and with creating automated LOFAR workflows on a distributed architecture. The LOFAR As A Service platform will serve the LOFAR Key Science Projects (KSPs), specifically the LOFAR Surveys KSP, which aims to provide science ready products to the scientific community. Additionally, this system will provide a robust method to re-process LOFAR data with a single click.