Canadian Virtual Observatory Project

David Schade

Canadian Astronomy Data Centre

Herzberg Institute for Astrophysics

National Research Council Canada

Advanced Network Day November 28, 2005

Canadian Astronomy Data Center

Formed in 1986

• Partner in many success stories– Hubble Space Telescope– Development of the model for the contemporary data centre

• Multi-wavelength/Multi-observatory– Leader in Virtual Observatory movement

• Canadian Legacy Surveys– State-of-the-Art Science Data Management is an integral part of these projects

• Current Holdings 112 Terabytes– Total traffic in/out: 12.1 Tbytes in past month

Advanced Network Day November 28, 2005

Canadian Astronomy Data Center

• CFHT Legacy Surveys• SuperNovae: Dark Energy

• Mass Distribution from Gravitational Lensing

• Formation of our Solar System

• Evolution of Galaxies and Quasars

• JCMT Legacy Surveys• Birth of Massive Galaxies at z~2

• Star Formation Processes

• ALMA Pathfinder

Advanced Network Day November 28, 2005

Canadian Astronomy Data Center

• CADC’s Golden Age is ahead of us

• Evolved from one data collection to many

• Virtual Observatory spans the globe and the full range of classes of data

• Future of Science Data Management lies in the multi-disciplinary Science Data Centre– Shares common low-level infrastructure– Shares elusive high-level functionalities

• Visualization• Advanced analysis expertise

• CADC is a unique Canadian resource

Advanced Network Day November 28, 2005

Dataflow into CADCDataflow into CADC

Space

Flow > 1 Tbyte/weekCANARIE is involved in improving the network from Hawaii

Advanced Network Day November 28, 2005

Data delivered to science users

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100

1000

10000

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Data Volume (Gbytes)

1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004

Year

Volume (Gbytes) of data retrieved from CADC archivesMany users potentially at 1 Tbyte/week level

Advanced Network Day November 28, 2005

Canadian Virtual Observatory / Observatoire Virtuel Canadian Virtual Observatory / Observatoire Virtuel CanadienCanadienCanadian Virtual Observatory / Observatoire Virtuel Canadian Virtual Observatory / Observatoire Virtuel CanadienCanadien

Advanced Network Day November 28, 2005

Distributed Data Query

Advanced Network Day November 28, 2005

Distributed Data Query

Advanced Network Day November 28, 2005

CADC is a leader

Advanced Network Day November 28, 2005

Distributed Catalogue Query

Advanced Network Day November 28, 2005

Orchestral performance: a meta-instrument for music

Bass, viola, cello, horns violins

Conductor, score, auditorium, intelligence

Listener

Advanced Network Day November 28, 2005

Astronomy IT infrastructure: A meta-instrument for scienceAstronomy IT infrastructure: A meta-instrument for science

Information technology infrastructure (hardware, software, intelligence)

Science user

Scientific literature, Databases, Data Collections

Advanced Network Day November 28, 2005

Virtual Observatory is based on open access to science data

Advanced Network Day November 28, 2005

Canadian success in astronomy

Advanced Network Day November 28, 2005

Open and Free Access

Canadian Astronomy is first in the world in impact of science papers– 76921 citations to 4836 papers 1994-2004

CFRS Papers with Schade as first or a principal author – Five papers with 603 citations– 0.8% of all Canadian citations– 7.6 times average citation rate

The papers combined CFHT spectroscopy with Hubble Space Telescope imagingThese papers required free access to Hubble Space TelescopeThese papers required free access to HST data archive

Canada has gained enormously from Open Access data policies

Advanced Network Day November 28, 2005

Future Requirements

Past

• Get the data onto my hard drive

Present

• Data Centre is my hard drive– Applications read directly from CADC

• Visualization• Data characterization and process configuration• Processing

• Dataset sizes ~ 10’s of Terabytes

Advanced Network Day November 28, 2005

Future Requirements

Future

• World is my hard drive/processor– Applications read directly from distributed data centres

– View and characterize data/configure processing

– Send data and configuration off to a remote processing node

– Processing returns its results into a CADC database

management/visualization/analysis environment

• Dataset sizes ~ 100’s of Terabytes

• Complexity of multi-wavelengths datasets is a challenge