No Arabic abstract
The Commission on Science and Information Technology (CTCI) of the Brazilian Astronomical Society (SAB) is tasked with assisting the Society on issues of astronomical data management, from its handling and the management of data centres and networks, to technical aspects of the archiving, storage and dissemination of data. In this paper we present a summary of the results of a survey recently conducted by the Commission to diagnose the status of several data-related issues within the Brazilian astronomical community, as well as some proposals derived therefrom.
INAF Trieste Astronomical Observatory (OATs) has a long tradition in information technology applied to Astronomical and Astrophysical use cases, particularly for what regards computing for data reduction, analysis and simulations; data and archives management; space missions data processing; design and software development for ground-based instruments. The ensemble of these activities, in the last years, pushed the need to acquire new computing resources and technologies and to deep competences in theirs management. In this paper we describe INAF-OATs computing centre technological stuff, our involvement in different EU Projects both in the path of building of EOSC, the European Open Science Cloud; in the design and prototyping of new Exascale supercomputers in Europe and the main research activities carried on using our computing centre.
Optical fibers have altered astronomical instrument design by allowing for a complex, often large instrument to be mounted in a remote and stable location with respect to the telescope. The fibers also enable the possibility to rearrange the signal from a focal plane to form a psuedo-slit at the entrance to a spectrograph, optimizing the detector usage and enabling the study of hundreds of thousands of stars or galaxies simultaneously. Multi-core fibers in particular offer several favorable properties with respect to traditional fibers: 1) the separation between single-mode cores is greatly reduced and highly regular with respect to free standing fibers, 2) they offer a monolithic package with multi-fiber capabilities and 3) they operate at the diffraction limit. These properties have enabled the realization of single component photonic lanterns, highly simplified fiber Bragg gratings, and advanced fiber mode scramblers. In addition, the precise grid of cores has enabled the design of efficient single-mode fiber integral field units for spectroscopy. In this paper, we provide an overview of the broad range of applications enabled by multi-core fiber technology in astronomy and outline future areas of development.
We introduce the 4-metre Multi-Object Spectroscopic Telescope (4MOST), a new high-multiplex, wide-field spectroscopic survey facility under development for the four-metre-class Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) at Paranal. Its key specifications are: a large field of view (FoV) of 4.2 square degrees and a high multiplex capability, with 1624 fibres feeding two low-resolution spectrographs ($R = lambda/Deltalambda sim 6500$), and 812 fibres transferring light to the high-resolution spectrograph ($R sim 20,000$). After a description of the instrument and its expected performance, a short overview is given of its operational scheme and planned 4MOST Consortium science; these aspects are covered in more detail in other articles in this edition of The Messenger. Finally, the processes, schedules, and policies concerning the selection of ESO Community Surveys are presented, commencing with a singular opportunity to submit Letters of Intent for Public Surveys during the first five years of 4MOST operations.
We present a machine learning based information retrieval system for astronomical observatories that tries to address user defined queries related to an instrument. In the modern instrumentation scenario where heterogeneous systems and talents are simultaneously at work, the ability to supply with the right information helps speeding up the detector maintenance operations. Enhancing the detector uptime leads to increased coincidence observation and improves the likelihood for the detection of astrophysical signals. Besides, such efforts will efficiently disseminate technical knowledge to a wider audience and will help the ongoing efforts to build upcoming detectors like the LIGO-India etc even at the design phase to foresee possible challenges. The proposed method analyses existing documented efforts at the site to intelligently group together related information to a query and to present it on-line to the user. The user in response can further go into interesting links and find already developed solutions or probable ways to address the present situation optimally. A web application that incorporates the above idea has been implemented and tested for LIGO Livingston, LIGO Hanford and Virgo observatories.
We present a high-performance, graphics processing unit (GPU)-based framework for the efficient analysis and visualization of (nearly) terabyte (TB)-sized 3-dimensional images. Using a cluster of 96 GPUs, we demonstrate for a 0.5 TB image: (1) volume rendering using an arbitrary transfer function at 7--10 frames per second; (2) computation of basic global image statistics such as the mean intensity and standard deviation in 1.7 s; (3) evaluation of the image histogram in 4 s; and (4) evaluation of the global image median intensity in just 45 s. Our measured results correspond to a raw computational throughput approaching one teravoxel per second, and are 10--100 times faster than the best possible performance with traditional single-node, multi-core CPU implementations. A scalability analysis shows the framework will scale well to images sized 1 TB and beyond. Other parallel data analysis algorithms can be added to the framework with relative ease, and accordingly, we present our framework as a possible solution to the image analysis and visualization requirements of next-generation telescopes, including the forthcoming Square Kilometre Array pathfinder radiotelescopes.