Our special session on data-intensive radio astronomy: bringing astrophysics to the exabyte era at the European Astronomical Meeting 2021 was a total success! We are so happy we cannot contain our excitement!

We would like to thank everyone for making this a reality! The co-chairs and SOC, the presenters and participants, and the organisation and volunteers of the conference!

The following table shows we accepted all submitted abstracts. The final program included 4 invited talks (Prof. Russ Taylor  – UCT/UWC/IDIA, Dr. Minh Huynh – CASS, Kensington WA, Dr. Katrin Heitmann – Argonne National Laboratory, Prof. Ian Bird – Cern), 17 contributed, and 6 ePosters. The gender balance overall (M-F) was 67%-33%.

Our summary was given by Prof Mattia Vaccari (UWC-IDIA) & Prof Giuliano Taffoni (INAF-OATs). They summarised the current and future challenges: large data rates, archives, source samples, the change of culture and allowing astronomers to focus on science rather than software development, and the promoting the idea of collaboration. They highlighted possible solutions and general trends: science analysis platforms & data lakes, machine learning approaches, software engineering best practices, virtual observatory (VO) accessible/compliant data archives and software tools. Finally, they mentioned Some of the new approaches for data analysis are to: use service platforms where computing is close to data, client-server architectures for visualisation (2D & VR), simulations as precision prediction tools, machine learning techniques and computing resources (exascale), HPC will speed up calculations and precess huge datasets.