Astronomy

Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-wavelength Astronomy: Data from CARMA are transferred from the telescope site near Bishop, California, to NCSA for long-term archiving. In 2006, the team deployed the initial version of the archive at NCSA, a set of community data-reduction codes, and an application that allows for the transportation of data to the archive via a network. The team also completed automated science workflows for the CARMA metadata workflow and worked on an automated imaging pipeline and the initial elements of a CARMA cyberenvironment.

Dark Energy Survey: NCSA will be the primary processing and archiving center for this large-scale collaboration, which will begin collecting data in 2009. The system includes portals that support remote search and retrieval of the DES images and object catalogs, and a science gateway that supports remote scientific analyses of the DES data. This project will enable the most precise, comprehensive, multi-technique study of the dark energy to date.

FLASH: FLASH is an adaptive mesh refinement hydrodynamics + N-body code for astrophysical problems originally developed by the ASC Center for Astrophysical Thermonuclear Flashes at the University of Chicago. It is freely available and has at least 200 users worldwide, not only in astrophysics but also in areas such as plasma physics and computational fluid dynamics. Much of the code's usefulness to the astrophysical community comes about through its N-body solver, Poisson solver, and radiative cooling module, which a team at NCSA develops. The team also tests and tunes FLASH for NCSA's high-performance computing platforms.

Laboratory for Cosmological Data Mining: Current approaches to cosmology require analysis of large quantities (terabytes and beyond) of highly dimensional and complex data. These analyses require the development and application of new computational tools. The LCDM is collecting and archiving new and existing astronomical datasets, and also developing, applying, and deploying data mining algorithms and technology to the wealth of available astronomical data in order to understand our universe.

Large Synoptic Survey Telescope: LSST is an 8.4-meter, wide-field telescope facility which will provide comprehensive, time-lapse imaging of the entire available sky in optical wavelengths when it sees "first light" in 2014. The LSST will generate, transfer, process and store an unprecedented amount of data, producing 15 terabytes of raw images per night and ultimately archiving approximately 125 petabytes. NCSA is partnering with a dozen other academic institutions and DOE labs to design and develop an advanced, highly automated data management system. NCSA leads a team composed of scientists and software developers from the University of Arizona, University of Washington, National Optical Astronomical Observatory, University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University and LSST Corporation. We are also collaborating with researchers at Argonne National Laboratory on community authorization technologies. We are developing a prototype system based on grid technologies that enables high-performance parallel I/O and robust, automated processing workflows.

National Optical Astronomy Observatory: As a precursor to the Large Synoptic Sky Survey, NCSA is establishing an active mirror of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory Science Archive for distributing data to the community and for hosting NOAO pipelines on NCSA resources.

National Virtual Observatory: The NVO is a data grid based on interoperable standard formats and protocols that enables the discovery and analysis of heterogeneous data over the network. NCSA contributes in the areas of resource registries, metadata standards, reference software for standard services, and security.

Near-Circumstellar AGB Environments: Data reduction and analysis of a large radio interferometry dataset are an important part of a synoptic monitoring campaign that will image the silicon monoxide emission in the near-circumstellar environment of late-type, evolved stars. The data volume and reduction complexity inherent in this project are a useful testbed for analyzing complex scientific workflows in radio astronomy. They are also of significant intrinsic value to astrophysicists. During 2006, a team from NCSA and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign reduced a substantial number of epochs taken toward the late-type star TX Cam. They also completed an initial workflow analysis.

Statistical Resampling in Radio Interferometric Imaging Fidelity Assessment: Modern radio interferometers form images by solving a complex instrumental calibration and inverse imaging problem for which there is no reliable method of fidelity assessment. Recent theoretical advances in statistical resampling techniques for dependent data, combined with increases in available high-performance computing resources enable new approaches to this important, unsolved problem for workflows in this domain. During the initial year of this work, a team at NCSA and the University of Manchester's Jodrell Bank Observatory focused on determining quantitatively if bootstrap resampling is a robust statistical technique for imaging fidelity assessment for a representative calibration and imaging problem in radio interferometry.

Teuthis: Teuthis is a control panel from which a user can remotely configure and build applications from local source code, then submit jobs based on those applications, track their progress, and transfer the data they produce to other machines. It dramatically reduces the labor required to manage large numbers of independent calculations, allowing parameter studies to be created with a few simple operations. It is also a notebook which organizes calculations so that they may be examined later within the context of the projects that motivated them. They may be assessed, continued, or repeated as desired. Finally, it is a tool for collaboration, allowing coworkers to share notebook records and examine each other's work. Its development has been motivated by the requirements of astrophysical simulation, but it need not be limited to this area of computational science. Teuthis is open source and available for public download.