Observational Astronomy NCSA projects radio astronomy: CARMA & SKA

1. Observational Astronomy NCSA projects radio astronomy: CARMA & SKA optical astronomy: DES & LSST access: NVO National Center for Supercomputing Applications

2. Key questions in current astrophysics • The big questions: • The formation and evolution of the universe from the earliest cosmic times to the present • The nature of the “dark energy” driving the current acceleration of the universe • These fundamental questions require a new era of ultra-sensitive, high-resolution imaging survey telescopes at multiple wavelengths, requiring: • Surveys over large solid angle and redshift cosmic volumes • Fine synoptic time-sampling and/or high astronomical completeness. • These survey telescopes will have: • High receptor count and data acquisition rates • Software/hardware boundary far closer to receptors than at present • Efficient, high-throughput survey operations modes

3. The new era of great survey telescopes LSST • Processing requirements: • High sensitivity, wide-field imaging • Demanding time and frequency non-imaging analysis and transient detection • Data management and processing implications: • Large O(109) survey catalogs • High associated data rates (TBps) • Compute processing rates (PF) • Petabyte and Exabyte archives with sophisticated community access mechanisms SKA

4. Data rates in observational Astronomy Optical data rates • Data rates are driven by: • Contemporary astrophysics questions require surveys of large cosmic volumes • Moore’s Law advances in detector counts and data output • Increasingly sophisticated data processing needed. • Data rates are exponential and require fundamentally new approaches to data management and processing. Telescope area CCD pixel count (Szalay & Gray) Radio data rates

5. A new optical survey telescope to be located in Chile • Map entire visible sky every 3-4 days • Rapid remapping for detecting moving objects in solar system and more distant transient phenomena • Increasing sensitivity with each remapping will result in deep images of distant universe • A tool for constraining dark energy • A Data Challenge across two continents • 3 Gpixel camera will produce 13 TB raw data per night • Real-time processing at Base Site to detect and report new transients • Deep processing and data product production at Archive Center at NCSA • Archive Capacities: 12 PB – 83 PB over 10 year lifetime • Compute Requirements: 80 TF – 270 TF over 10 year lifetime

6. Just a few LSST challenges • Sharing a massive database with the community • Single DB releases will grow to over 10 TB with trillions of rows • Community access will be a mix of simple and complex queries • Simple queries need to return quickly (50 simultaneous queries in < 2 sec) • A few complex queries may require full table scans • To meet demands, part of data center must be optimized for high I/O bandwidth • Drives up “spindle count” (the number of drives) over their capacity • Current models suggest that meeting performance requires 10x excess DB storage • Investigating new hardware and database technologies to address issues • Allowing Community to leverage LSST processing cyberinfrastructure for custom processing and analysis • All sky analysis not possible on desktop • Scientists need to insert new processing into existing pipelines • VM-based clusters and cloud technologies can provide better access for user code

7. New-era radio interferometer in the 2015-2025 decade • One square kilometer of collecting area • Science: • cradle of life • probing the dark ages • cosmic magnetism • strong field tests of gravity • galaxy evolution, cosmology, & dark energy • A peta- or exa-scale processing and data management challenge for this decade.

8. Observational astronomy faces a coming tsunami of data promising enormous scientific advances but threatening to overwhelm computational and data management resources ⎯ offering great opportunities for NCSA National Center for Supercomputing Applications