Two New Zealand research groups are to lead work on designing crucial aspects of the world's largest and most sensitive radio telescope, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), Science and Innovation Minister Steven Joyce announced Tuesday.

Auckland's AUT University and Wellington's Victoria University would lead work on the central signal processor and the science data processor work packages, working alongside other New Zealand experts over the three-year design phase, Joyce said in a statement.

"The SKA is a global effort to create the biggest and most technologically advanced radio telescope ever built. It will enable astronomers to monitor the sky in unprecedented detail and survey the entire sky thousands of times faster than any system currently in existence," Joyce said.

More than 350 scientists and engineers, from 18 countries and from more than 100 institutions, would be involved in the work, he said.

"The government is investing a total of 1.717 million NZ dollars (1.42 million US dollars) for this project, with New Zealand institutions providing matching contributions, totalling more than 2.17 million NZ dollars over three years."

One of the greatest challenges associated with the SKA project is the "big data challenge" of how to maximize the scientific return from the vast amount of data generated, said New Zealand scientific representative to the SKA board of directors Dr Melanie Johnston-Hollitt, of Victoria University.

"We'll be working with our partners from across New Zealand to lead the work concerned with how to best extract information from data captured by the SKA, and determine the computation requirements needed to process it," she said in a statement.

The SKA, to be located in Australia and South Africa, will consist of thousands of dishes and millions of dipole radio receptors, with an effective collecting area of a square kilometer, making it 100 times as sensitive as the biggest existing telescopes and image resolution quality 50 times that of the Hubble Space Telescope.

Dr Andrew Ensor, of AUT, is leading the design of the survey correlator, which would combine the signals from all the receivers.

The data volumes and computational requirements would be 10 times that of the world's fastest supercomputers and require new high-performance computing and low-power technologies, Ensor said in a statement.

The SKA project, which is expected to become operational after 2020, is organized by institutions from 10 nations, Australia, Canada, China, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, South Africa, Sweden, the Netherlands and Britain, with India as an associate member.