Tag Archives: astronomy

Canada Explores New Frontiers in Astroinformatics

Posted on January 22, 2011 by astrocompute

This week’s post links to an excellent article on the HPC In The Cloud web site on how the Canadian Astronomy Data Centre is migrating its operations to a cloud computing platform. To my knowledge, CADC is the first astronomy … Continue reading →

Posted in astroinformatics, Astronomy, astronomy surveys, Cloud computing, cyberinfrastructure, data archives, Data Management, High performance computing, information sharing, Parallelization, programming, software sustainability | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Introducing the Digital Scientist

Posted on January 15, 2011 by astrocompute

The International Science Grid This Week has now become the  Digital Scientist. The change reflects the modern landscape of scientific computing in this era of the “data tsunami,” where clouds, high performance clusters and grids, as well as the humble … Continue reading →

Posted in astroinformatics, Astronomy, Cloud computing, cyberinfrastructure, Data Management, education, High performance computing, information sharing, Parallelization, programming, social media, social networking, software engineering, software sustainability, Uncategorized, Web 2.0 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

A U.S. Software Infrastructure Institute?

Posted on December 31, 2010 by astrocompute

In August 2010, I was invited to take part in the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Workshops on Distributed Computing, Multidisciplinary Science, and the NSF’s Scientific Software Innovation Institutes Program. The workshops were chaired by Miron Livny, Ian Foster, Ruth … Continue reading →

Posted in astroinformatics, cyberinfrastructure, High performance computing, information sharing, Parallelization, software maintenance, software sustainability | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Spectacular Astronomy Image Mosaics and a New Astronomy Blog

Posted on December 23, 2010 by astrocompute

This week, a new astronomy blog was released. It is called the “Montage Image Mosaic  Software” blog. The Montage team (of which I have the privilege of being a member) will be blogging about how Montage is used in scientific … Continue reading →

Posted in astroinformatics, Astronomy, astronomy surveys, High performance computing, image mosaics, Parallelization, software maintenance, software sustainability | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

An Example Of How Web 2.0 Can Be Used In Professional Astronomy

Posted on December 18, 2010 by astrocompute

I discuss in this post some ideas for how Web 2.0 can be used in professional astronomy, and the example I will used is that of building collaborative astronomical image mosaics from a collection of input images with the Montage … Continue reading →

Posted in astroinformatics, Astronomy, cyberinfrastructure, Data Management, image mosaics, information sharing, social media, social networking, Uncategorized, Web 2.0 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Finding New Planets With Cloud Computing?

Posted on December 10, 2010 by astrocompute

Surveys for Transiting Planets Planet finding is a heavy industry these days. The Kepler satellite (http://kepler.nasa.gov/), launched on 06 March 2009, is a NASA mission that uses high-precision photometry to search for transiting exoplanets around main sequence stars. The French … Continue reading →

Posted in archives, Astronomy, astronomy surveys, Cloud computing, CoRoT, cyberinfrastructure, exoplanets, High performance computing, Kepler, Parallelization, time series data, Transiting exoplanets, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Supercomputing10 (SC10) From A Distance

Posted on November 24, 2010 by astrocompute

Last week, SC10 was held in New Orleans, LA. SC is an annual international conference for High Performance Computing, Storage, Networking and Analysis, and this year’s festivities were the biggest and best attended yet. The meeting’s technology thrusts were Climate … Continue reading →

Posted in astroinformatics, Cloud computing, cyberinfrastructure, Data Management, High performance computing, LSST, Parallelization, SC10, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Taking Wolfram Alpha For A Test Drive

Posted on November 12, 2010 by astrocompute

Wolfram Alpha is, according to the website, the world’s first computational knowledge engine, and I have been kicking tires and taking her out for a spin. The user interface is as simple as Google’s: nothing but a text box where … Continue reading →

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An Astronomical Image Mosaic of the Sky at 21 cm

Posted on November 3, 2010 by astrocompute

While attending a meeting in Charlottesville, I chatted to Brian Kent, who has been doing some exciting work with the Montage image mosaic engine. He is part of a team that has been building mosaics of the sky at the … Continue reading →

Posted in Astronomy, astronomy surveys, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

The Cost of Running A Service on the Cloud Compared With Running It Locally

Posted on October 28, 2010 by astrocompute

My previous posts have described the costs of running data applications on the cloud.  In this post, I provide a simple example of a cost-effectiveness study to answer the question: Is it cheaper to host an on-demand image mosaic service … Continue reading →

Posted in astroinformatics, Astronomy, Cloud computing, cyberinfrastructure, High performance computing, Parallelization, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | 5 Comments