Massive Science with VO and Grids

Nichol, R., Smith, G., Miller, C., Freeman, P., Genovese, C., Wasserman, L., Bryan, B., Gray, A., Schneider, J. and Moore, A. (2005) Massive Science with VO and Grids. In: Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems XV, Ocotber 2005.

Abstract/Summary

There is a growing need for massive computational resources for the analysis of new astronomical datasets. To tackle this problem, we present here our first steps towards marrying two new and emerging technologies; the Virtual Observatory (e.g, AstroGrid) and the computa- tional grid (e.g. TeraGrid, COSMOS etc.). We discuss the construction of VOTechBroker, which is a modular software tool designed to abstract the tasks of submission and management of a large number of compu- tational jobs to a distributed computer system. The broker will also interact with the AstroGrid workflow and MySpace environments. We discuss our planned usages of the VOTechBroker in computing a huge number of n–point correlation functions from the SDSS data and mas- sive model-fitting of millions of CMBfast models to WMAP data. We also discuss other applications including the determination of the XMM Cluster Survey selection function and the construction of new WMAP maps.