Computer Science Tools Flood Astronomers With Data 60
purkinje writes "Astronomy is getting a major data-gathering boost from computer science, as new tools like real-time telescopic observations and digital sky surveys provide astronomers with an unprecedented amount of information — the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, for instance, generates 30 terabytes of data each night. Using informatics and other data-crunching approaches, astronomers — with the help of computer science — may be able to get at some of the biggest, as-yet-unanswerable cosmological questions."
Generates? Wrong tense. (Score:5, Informative)
*WILL* generate. LSST isn't operating yet.
And yes, 30TB is a lot of data now, but we have some time before they finally have first light.
Operations isn't supposed to start 'til 2019 : http://www.lsst.org/lsst/science/timeline [lsst.org]
We just need network and disk drive sizes to keep doubling at the rate they have, and we'll be laughing about how we thought 30TB/night was going to be a problem.
SDO finally launched last year with a date rate of over 1TB/day ... and all through planning, people were complaining about the data rates ... it's a lot, but it's not insurmountable as it might've been 8 years ago, when we were looking at 80 to 120GB disks.
Although, it'd be nice if monitor resolutions had kept growing ... if anything, they've gotten worse the last couple of years.
(Disclaimer : I work in science informatics; I've run into Kirk Bourne at a lot of meetings, and we used to work in the same building, but we we deal with different science disciplines)
Re:Generates? Wrong tense. (Score:5, Informative)
In fact, they just started blasting the site. I actually live next door to the LSST's architect, which is pretty cool.
Astronomers generate a tremendous amount of data, bested only by particle physicists. Storing it all is a challenge, to put it mildly. Backup is basically impossible.
The real problem is that the data lines that go from the summit to the outside world are still not fast. The summits here are pretty remote and even when you get to a major road, it's still in farm country. And then getting it out of the country is tough--all of our network traffic to North America hits a major bottleneck in Panama, so if you're trying to mirror the database or access the one in Chile, it can be frustratingly slow.