  Next generation radio telescopes, like the Square Kilometre Array, will
acquire an unprecedented amount of data for radio astronomy. The development of
fast, parallelisable or distributed algorithms for handling such large-scale
data sets is of prime importance. Motivated by this, we investigate herein a
convex optimisation algorithmic structure, based on primal-dual
forward-backward iterations, for solving the radio interferometric imaging
problem. It can encompass any convex prior of interest. It allows for the
distributed processing of the measured data and introduces further flexibility
by employing a probabilistic approach for the selection of the data blocks used
at a given iteration. We study the reconstruction performance with respect to
the data distribution and we propose the use of nonuniform probabilities for
the randomised updates. Our simulations show the feasibility of the
randomisation given a limited computing infrastructure as well as important
computational advantages when compared to state-of-the-art algorithmic
structures.
