Section: Application Domains

Data analysis in astrophysics

We focus on computationally intensive numerical algorithms arising in the data analysis of current and forthcoming Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) experiments in astrophysics. This application is studied in collaboration with researchers from University Paris Diderot, and the objective is to make available the algorithms to the astrophysics community, so that they can be used in large experiments.

In CMB data analysis, astrophysicists produce and analyze multi-frequency 2D images of the universe when it was 5% of its current age. The new generation of the CMB experiments observes the sky with thousands of detectors over many years, producing overwhelmingly large and complex data sets, which nearly double every year therefore following Moore's Law. Planck (http://planck.esa.int/) is a keystone satellite mission which has been developed under auspices of the European Space Agency (ESA). Planck has been surveying the sky since 2010, produces terabytes of data and requires 100 Petaflops per image analysis of the universe. It is predicted that future experiments will collect half petabyte of data, and will require 100 Exaflops per analysis as early as in 2020. This shows that data analysis in this area, as many other applications, will keep pushing the limit of available supercomputing power for the years to come.