Section: Application Domains

Astrophysics

Astrophysics is a major field to produce large volume of data. For instance, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (http://www.lsst.org/lsst/ ) will produce 15 TB of data every night, with the goals of discovering thousands of exoplanets and of uncovering the nature of dark matter and dark energy in the universe. The Square Kilometer Array (http://www.skatelescope.org/ ) produces 9 Tbits/s of raw data. One of the scientific projects related to this instrument called Evolutionary Map of the Universe is working on more than 100 TB of images. The Euclid Imaging Consortium will generate 1 PB data per year.

Avalon collaborates with the Institut de Physique Nucléaire de Lyon (IPNL) laboratory on large scale numerical simulations in astronomy and astrophysics. Contributions of the Avalon members have been related to algorithmic skeletons to demonstrate large scale connectivity, the development of procedures for the generation of realistic mock catalogs, and the development of a web interface to launch large cosmological simulations on Grid'5000 .

This collaboration, that continues around the topics addressed by the CLUES project (http://www.clues-project.org ), has been extended thanks to the tight links with the CC-IN2P3. Major astrophysics projects execute part of their computing, and store part of their data on the resources provided by the CC-IN2P3. Among them, we can mention SNFactory, Euclid, or LSST. These applications constitute typical use cases for the research developed in the Avalon team: they are generally structured as workflows and a huge amount of data (from TB to PB) is involved.