Analyzing large astronomical data sets: The Science Portal solution

Dr. Angelo Fausti Neto
Laboratório Interinstitucional de e-Astronomia (LIneA), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Large Synoptic Survey Telescope
(pdf of presentation is available here)

Large multi-wavelength photometric surveys have had a profound impact in astronomy forcing new methods in computer science and statistics due to the large data sets and the complexity involved in the science analysis. In this talk we describe the Science Portal: a web-based infrastructure to support science analysis for the Dark Energy Survey (DES) collaboration being developed in Brazil since 2007 through the DES-Brazil consortium and LIneA. The Science Portal is being used for several applications in DES including real-time assessment of the survey image quality, visualization and data exploration, and more recently to prepare science-ready catalogs and run science analysis pipelines. We discuss the challenges and solutions to analyze DES Year 1 data and perspectives for the full DES data release planned for 2018/19. While the Science Portal has being designed for DES it can be extended to other surveys. We discuss, in particular, the importance of having such an infrastructure for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) in the next decade.