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Register a new userThe True Bottleneck of Modern Scientific Computing in Astronomy
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We discuss what hampers the rate of scientific progress in our exponentially growing world. The rapid increase in technologies leaves the growth of research result metrics far behind. The reason for this lies in the education of astronomers lacking basic computer science aspects crucially important in the data intensive science era.
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Astronomy is entering a new era of discovery, coincident with the establishment of new facilities for observation and simulation that will routinely generate petabytes of data. While an increasing reliance on automated data analysis is anticipated, a critical role will remain for visualization-based knowledge discovery. We have investigated scientific visualization applications in astronomy through an examination of the literature published during the last two decades. We identify the two most active fields for progress - visualization of large-N particle data and spectral data cubes - discuss open areas of research, and introduce a mapping between astronomical sources of data and data representations used in general purpose visualization tools. We discuss contributions using high performance computing architectures (e.g: distributed processing and GPUs), collaborative astronomy visualization, the use of workflow systems to store metadata about visualization parameters, and the use of advanced interaction devices. We examine a number of issues that may be limiting the spread of scientific visualization research in astronomy and identify six grand challenges for scientific visualization research in the Petascale Astronomy Era.
We review the problems related to the definition and use of the ecliptic in modern astronomy and we discuss whether the concept of an ecliptic is still needed for some specific uses.
Virtual Observatory (VO) is a data-intensively online astronomical research and education environment, which takes advantages of advanced information technologies to achieve seamless and global access to astronomical information. AstroCloud is a cyber-infrastructure for astronomy research initiated by Chinese Virtual Observatory (China-VO) project, and also a kind of physical distributed platform which integrates lots of tasks such as telescope access proposal management, data archiving, data quality control, data release and open access, cloud based data processing and analysis. It consists of five application channels, i.e. observation, data, tools, cloud and public and is acting as a full lifecycle management system and gateway for astronomical data and telescopes. Physically, the platform is hosted in six cities currently, i.e. Beijing, Nanjing, Shanghai, Kunming, Lijiang and Urumqi, and serving more than 17 thousand users. Achievements from international Virtual Observatories and Cloud Computing are adopted heavily. In the paper, backgrounds of the project, architecture, Cloud Computing environment, key features of the system, current status and future plans are introduced.
At the Canadian Astronomy Data Centre, we have combined our cloud computing system, CANFAR, with the worlds most advanced machine learning software, Skytree, to create the worlds first cloud computing system for data mining in astronomy. CANFAR provides a generic environment for the storage and processing of large datasets, removing the requirement to set up and maintain a computing system when implementing an extensive undertaking such as a survey pipeline. 500 processor cores and several hundred terabytes of persistent storage are currently available to users. The storage is implemented via the International Virtual Observatory Alliances VOSpace protocol, and is accessible both interactively, and to all processing jobs. The user interacts with CANFAR by utilizing virtual machines, which appear to them as equivalent to a desktop. Each machine is replicated as desired to perform large-scale parallel processing. Such an arrangement enables the user to immediately install and run the same astronomy code that they already utilize, in the same way as on a desktop. In addition, unlike many cloud systems, batch job scheduling is handled for the user on multiple virtual machines by the Condor job queueing system. Skytree is installed and run just as any other software on the system, and thus acts as a library of command line data mining functions that can be integrated into ones wider analysis. Thus we have created a generic environment for large-scale analysis by data mining, in the same way that CANFAR itself has done for storage and processing. Because Skytree scales to large data in linear runtime, this allows the full sophistication of the huge fields of data mining and machine learning to be applied to the hundreds of millions of objects that make up current large datasets. We demonstrate the utility of the CANFAR+Skytree system by showing science results obtained. [Abridged]
A large multitude of scientific computing tools is available today. This article gives an overview of available tools and explains the main application fields. In addition basic principles of number representations in computing and the resulting truncation errors are treated. The selection of tools is for those students, who work in the field of accelerator beam dynamics.
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