Tag Archives: Kristin Williamson

Astronomy, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Science, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

Winding Down Science at NCSA

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The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in Urbana is fading into history. Founded to enable computational science, NCSA boosted the Internet with the release of the Mosaic web browser.  In recent years, NCSA has operated the Blue Waters supercomputer (With tens of thousands of compute nodes and petabytes of memory, Blue Waters is something like 4 orders of magnitude bigger than “the” Cray NCSA was founded to operate.)

But all things come to an end, and funding for Blue Waters is ending soon, so current science must wrap up and move to other systems.  (By a strange coincidence, prime replacement systems are located in heavily Republican Texas.)

One of the more romantic projects at NCSA in recent years has been the Dark Energy Survey.  Part of a world wide collaboration, NCSA has hosted the data process for the archives for DES. Notably, the data is collected in South America and zapped up the spine of the Americas every night to Illinois.

This too is winding down.  Data collection for this initial archive officially ended January 9, 2019, though the archive will continue (and we all hope, will be preserved for future use) [1].  The telescope will presumably continue to be used, but apparently not funded by the US. Perhaps Chinese funding will be forthcoming?

This is not just a cool IT project (I mean, it’s a transcontinental data pipeline!). The press release boasts about the massive amount of data collected and the ground breaking results. Observations of “a billion galaxies that are billions of light-years from Earth”, mapping Dark Energy, and contributing to the study of gravity waves, and other important findings.

So, the first Dark Energy Survey is a wrap. Well done all.  We haven’t seen all the results yet, we can hope that the massive effort will yield even more important understanding of Dark Energy.

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  1. Kristin Williamson, NCSA brings Dark Energy Survey data to science community into 2021, in NCSA News. 2019. http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/news/story/ncsa_brings_dark_energy_survey_data_to_science_community_into_2021