NEWS

LSST Awarded Time on TeraGrid

April 2010

The NSF's TeraGrid supercomputing infrastructure consists of large clusters
of computers located at eleven centers in the US.
Credit: Courtesy of Indiana University, based on illustration by Nicolle Rager Fuller,
National Science Foundation.


We've just received word that the Data Management (DM) team has been awarded significant resources on the TeraGrid, the National Science Foundation's supercomputing infrastructure consisting of large clusters of computers located at eleven centers in the US. This award will allow the team to perform its most ambitious test to date as it practices processing the massive amounts of data LSST will produce.

As it carries out its 10-year survey, LSST will produce over 15 terabytes of raw astronomical data each night (30 terabytes processed), resulting in a database catalog of 22 petabytes and an image archive of 100 petabytes. During the LSST design & development phase, the DM group has been developing a software framework and science codes with the scalability and robustness necessary to process this unprecedented data stream.

In January, 2010, the LSST Data Management project turned in the proposal to the TeraGrid program requesting infrastructure for DM design and development. Mike Freemon, Infrastructure Lead for DM and Project Manager at NCSA, says the team's proposal was awarded their full request of TeraGrid resources both CPU hours and data storage: 1.51M Service Units (CPU-hours), 400TB of dual-copy mass storage, and 20TB spinning disk storage.
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