Analysing greenhouse gas emissions of an astronomical institute is a first step in reducing its environmental impact. Here, we break down the emissions of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg and propose measures for reductions.
Measuring scientific development is a difficult task. Different metrics have been put forward to evaluate scientific development; in this paper we explore a metric that uses the number of peer-reviewed, and when available non-peer-reviewed articles,
research research articles as an indicator of development in the field of astronomy. We analyzed the available publication record, using the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Database System, by country affiliation in the time span between 1950 and 2011 for countries with a Gross National Income of less than 14,365 USD in 2010. This represents 149 countries. We propose that this metric identifies countries in `astronomy development with a culture of research publishing. We also propose that for a country to develop astronomy it should invest in outside expert visits, send their staff abroad to study and establish a culture of scientific publishing. Furthermore, we propose that this paper may be used as a baseline to measure the success of major international projects, such as the International Year of Astronomy 2009.
This paper describes LFRic: the new weather and climate modelling system being developed by the UK Met Office to replace the existing Unified Model in preparation for exascale computing in the 2020s. LFRic uses the GungHo dynamical core and runs on a
semi-structured cubed-sphere mesh. The design of the supporting infrastructure follows object orientated principles to facilitate modularity and the use of external libraries where possible. In particular, a `separation of concerns between the science code and parallel code is imposed to promote performance portability. An application called PSyclone, developed at the STFC Hartree centre, can generate the parallel code enabling deployment of a single source science code onto different machine architectures. This paper provides an overview of the scientific requirement, the design of the software infrastructure, and examples of PSyclone usage. Preliminary performance results show strong scaling and an indication that hybrid MPI/OpenMP performs better than pure MPI.
Time-domain astronomy (TDA) is facing a paradigm shift caused by the exponential growth of the sample size, data complexity and data generation rates of new astronomical sky surveys. For example, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), which will
begin operations in northern Chile in 2022, will generate a nearly 150 Petabyte imaging dataset of the southern hemisphere sky. The LSST will stream data at rates of 2 Terabytes per hour, effectively capturing an unprecedented movie of the sky. The LSST is expected not only to improve our understanding of time-varying astrophysical objects, but also to reveal a plethora of yet unknown faint and fast-varying phenomena. To cope with a change of paradigm to data-driven astronomy, the fields of astroinformatics and astrostatistics have been created recently. The new data-oriented paradigms for astronomy combine statistics, data mining, knowledge discovery, machine learning and computational intelligence, in order to provide the automated and robust methods needed for the rapid detection and classification of known astrophysical objects as well as the unsupervised characterization of novel phenomena. In this article we present an overview of machine learning and computational intelligence applications to TDA. Future big data challenges and new lines of research in TDA, focusing on the LSST, are identified and discussed from the viewpoint of computational intelligence/machine learning. Interdisciplinary collaboration will be required to cope with the challenges posed by the deluge of astronomical data coming from the LSST.
We present the main results of the 8th International Astronomical Consortium for High Energy Calibration (IACHEC) meeting, held in Theddingworth, Leicestershire, between March 25 and 28, 2013. Over 50 scientists directly involved in the calibration o
f operational and future high-energy missions gathered during 3.5 days to discuss the status of the X-ray payload inter-calibration, as well as possible ways to improve it. Sect. 4 of this Report summarises our current understanding of the energy-dependent inter-calibration status.