ASCL poster at AAS
Abstract: The Astrophysics Source Code Library (ASCL, ascl.net) is a free online registry of codes used in astornomy research. Indexed by ADS, it now contains nearly 1,000 codes and with recent major changes, is better than ever! The resource has a new infrastructure that offers greater flexibility and functionality for users, including an easier submission process, better browsing, one-click author search, and an RSS feeder for news. The new database structure is easier to maintain and offers new possibilities for collaboration. Come see what we’ve done!
Authors: Alice Allen (ASCL), Judy Schmidt (ASCL), Bruce Berriman (IPAC/Caltech), Kimberly DuPrie (ASCL/STScI), Robert J. Hanisch (NIST), Jessica D. Mink (SAO), Robert J. Nemiroff (MTU), Lior Shamir (LTU), Keith Shortridge (AAO), Mark B. Taylor (UBristol), Peter J. Teuben (UMD), John F. Wallin (MTSU)
December 2014 additions to the ASCL
Fourteen codes were added to the ASCL in December 2014:
BRUCE/KYLIE: Pulsating star spectra synthesizer
Cheetah: Starspot modeling code
CRPropa: Numerical tool for the propagation of UHE cosmic rays, gamma-rays and neutrinos
DAMIT: Database of Asteroid Models from Inversion Techniques
GeoTOA: Geocentric TOA tools
HMF: Halo Mass Function calculator
Hrothgar: MCMC model fitting toolkit
MMAS: Make Me A Star
PIAO: Python spherIcAl Overdensity code
SoFiA: Source Finding Application
SOPHIA: Simulations Of Photo Hadronic Interactions in Astrophysics
TraP: Transients discovery pipeline for image-plane surveys
URCHIN: Reverse ray tracer
UTM: Universal Transit Modeller
Software licensing resources
Below, a list of informative, interesting (or both!) writings about software licensing; the ASCL doesn’t necessarily agree with all positions in these articles, but we want to know what people are thinking even when we don’t agree with them.
EUDAT License Wizard
http://www.eudat.eu/news/eudat-license-wizard-guides-you-through-legal-maze
http://ufal.github.io/lindat-license-selector/
A Quick Guide to Software Licensing for the Scientist-Programmer
By Andrew Morin, Jennifer Urban, Piotr Sliz
http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.1002598
Relicensing yt from GPLv3 to BSD
By Matthew Turk
http://blog.yt-project.org/post/Relicensing.html
Best Practices for Scientific Computing
Greg Wilson, D. A. Aruliah, C. Titus Brown, Neil P. Chue Hong, Matt Davis, Richard T. Guy, Steven H. D. Haddock, Katy Huff, Ian M. Mitchell, Mark Plumbley, Ben Waugh, Ethan P. White, Paul Wilson
http://arxiv.org/abs/1210.0530v4
The Whys and Hows of Licensing Scientific Code
By Jake VanderPlas
http://www.astrobetter.com/the-whys-and-hows-of-licensing-scientific-code/
Licensing your code
ASCL blog post https://ascl.net/wordpress/?p=726 lists the following:
Making Sense of Software Licensing
Choose a license
Open Source Initiative also offers information on licenses
White paper from the Software Freedom Law Center
Bruce Berriman’s post on relicensing Montage
The Gentle Art of Muddying the Licensing Waters
by Glyn Moody
http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2014/08/the-gentle-art-of-muddying-the-licensing-waters/index.htm
STM open license suggestions and aftermath
Open Access Licensing
Don’t Muddy the “Open” Waters: SPARC Joins Call for STM Association to Rethink New Licenses
Global Coalition of Access to Research, Science and Education Organizations calls on STM to Withdraw New Model Licenses
STM response to ‘Global Coalition of Access to Research, Science and Education Organisations calls on STM to Withdraw New Model Licenses’
New “open” licenses aren’t so open
Interesting talk on ITAR
http://www.state.gov/e/stas/series/154211.htm
Discusses dual-use technologies, which is what codes are under ITAR. These are governed by the Wassenaar Arrangement. The countries that participate meet 3x/year to decide what restrictions to put on dual-use technologies. Dr. James Harrington was the speaker. Slides available on that page.
AAS Software Events: The Short List
A short list without the descriptions, other information, and Saturday-start bootcamp the longer list has, because short is beautiful, too! Some may require registration/charge a fee.
Astropy Tutorial, Sunday, 8:00-11:00 (Tutorial)
Location: 612 (Convention Center)
SciCoder@AAS: Intro to Databases for Astronomers, Sunday, 9:00-5:00 (Workshop)
Location: 607 (Convention Center)
Astrostatistics, Sunday, 9:30-6:00 (Workshop)
Location: 618/619 (Convention Center)
Collaborating Online with GitHub and Other Tools, Sunday, 12:00-5:00 (Workshop)
Location: 303 (Convention Center)
232. Licensing Astrophysics Codes: What You Need to Know, Tuesday, 2:00-3:30 (Special Session)
Location: 615 (Convention Center)
Software Publication Special Interest Group (SPSIG) Inaugural Meeting, Tuesday, 3:45-4:45 (Special Interest Group meeting)
Location: 615 (Convention Center)
Catalogs, Surveys, and Computation Posters, Wednesday, 9:00-5:30
315 Astroinformatics and Astrostatistics in Astronomical Research: Steps Towards Better Curricula, Wednesday, 10:00-11:30 (Special Session)
Location: 620 (Convention Center)
The SKA Telescope: Global Project, Revolutionary Science, Extreme Computing Challenges, Wednesday, 12:30-3:30 (Splinter Meeting)
Location: 4C-4 (Convention Center)
332. Catalogs/Surveys/Computation – UVOIR, Wednesday, 3:10-3:20 PM (Oral Session)
Location: 620 (Convention Center)
434. Computation, Data Handling and Other Matters Posters, Thursday, 9:00-2:00
Hack Day, Thursday, 10:00-7:00 (Workshop)
Location: 4C-2 (Convention Center)
Update: Where the codes are; also, a bit about citing software
This is an update on figures I’ve previously shared (most recently here). Currently, the ASCL indexes 977 codes. The percentage of these codes housed on social coding sites are:
GitHub: 8.1%
SourceForge: 4.2%
Code.Google: 2.8%
Bitbucket: 1.3%
This gives us 16.4% of codes listed on the ASCL housed on a public social coding site, an increase since February of 5.4%, most of this from GitHub (up from 4.2% in February), though the percentages of four sites have increased.
As I said in February, I expect the percentage of codes on social coding sites will continue to grow, especially since GitHub’s use is increasing quickly in the community. One factor some credit for this increase is that GitHub has made it easy to push code to Zenodo for archiving and DOI minting, and providing another way to cite code.*
As mentioned in my previous post, how codes are cited vary. Software citation will be the main topic at Tuesday’s inaugural Software Publishing Special Interest Group meeting at AAS225, which will be held at 3:45 PM in 615 of the Convention Center. If you are at AAS this week, you are welcome to attend and I hope to see you there!
*It was reported at .Astronomy6 that “some astro journals won’t even accept a DOI as a citation.” I don’t know which journals and hope someone will enlighten me; I would like to know the rationale for that stance and would gladly take this up with publishers.
Astro software citation examples
One of the unconference sessions (proposed during the event) held at December’s .Astronomy was on software citation, this subject having come up in an earlier session on improving credit for software.
Discussion and comments in the session inspired me to look at astronomy’s current practices for citing software. Though not an exhaustive list, I looked in more than a dozen journals for citations for codes used in research, and below are some of the examples I gathered.
The most common way to cite software is to reference a paper describing the code. This is how, for example, the authors of yt would like that software cited, as shown from a recent MNRAS paper:
Sometimes a link to the website for a code is listed as a reference to it, as was done in a Classical and Quantum Gravity paper:
Conference proceedings are cited in some cases, as the citation below for WCSTools in an The Astrophysical Journal paper demonstrates:
ASCL entries can be cited, too, as shown in this citation for pynbody in a paper published in Physical Review D:
Someone — I don’t remember who — reported that Google Scholar does not index mentions of codes, GitHub repos, etc. as citations, because they are not papers. An opinion tweeted out about this summed up the sentiment in the room pretty well! I plan to take this up with Google after the AAS meeting. Fortunately, ADS does index properly formatted software references; the only reference listed in this post that I didn’t see captured by ADS was the URL for CAMB, which is not surprising (nor expected).
A subsequent post will include additional information and a list of resources about software citation, to be posted before the first Special Interest Group on software publishing meeting scheduled at AAS225 that will be held on Tuesday, January 6, from 3:45 PM – 4:45 PM in 615 in the Convention Center. The main topic of this meeting will be software citation, and all interested parties are welcome to attend.
The journals below were part of my hunting grounds for software citations. Ever had a citation to software you used in research refused by a publication? If so, I’m interested in knowing the details; please share here or send them to editor@ascl.net. Thanks!
American Institute of Physics Proceedings
Astronomy & Astrophysics
Astronomy and Computing
The Astronomical Journal
The Astrophysical Journal
The Astrophysical Journal Supplement
Classical and Quantum Gravity
Icarus
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Nature
Physical Review D
Proceedings of the SPIE
Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia
Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan
Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific
Additional screenshots of software citations:
Formatting counts! Below, two citations for Turbospectrum, the first formatted in a way ADS can pick up and count the citation, the second one not.
Software Publication Special Interest Group (SPSIG)
The AAS’s Working Group on Astronomical Software (WGAS) has invited the ASCL to form a Special Interest Group (SIG) on software publication. We think this is a dandy idea and have accepted the invitation. The inaugural meeting will be held on Tuesday, January 6, from 3:45 PM – 4:45 PM in 615 in the Convention Center. This is immediately after the Licensing Astrophysics Codes: What You Need to Know special session that is from 2:00-3:30 in that same room.
As issues around software citation came up several times at this month’s .Astronomy meeting and has received subsequent discussion online since, it seems fitting for this to be the main topic for the first meeting of the SPSIG.
Please note that this SIG meeting does not appear in the AAS schedule. The meeting is open to anyone who is interested, and additional information will be posted here as it becomes available.
AAS225 software events
Software is an integral part of astronomy research and the American Astronomical Society meetings reflect this. The upcoming AAS meeting in Seattle (January 4-8) offers workshops, sessions, posters, tutorials, and discussions that focus on many aspects of astronomical software. On Tuesday, join us for a special session on code licensing; immediately after, the inaugural meeting of the Software Publishing Special Interest Group will be held. On Thursday, the wildly successful and fun Hack Day returns. Hack Day includes but is not limited to hacking software; whatever skills you have or project you want to take on, there’s a place for you at Hack Day!
Organized by day, below is a list of software-related offerings at the AAS meeting. See you there!
Saturday
Software Carpentry Bootcamp, Saturday-Sunday, 9:00-5:30, organized by August Muench
Computing is now an integral part of every aspect of science, but most scientists are never taught how to build, use, validate, and share software well. As a result, many spend hours or days doing things badly that could be done well in just a few minutes. The goal of AAS 225 Software Carpentry 2 day “bootcamp” is to change that so that astronomers can spend less time wrestling with software and more time doing useful research. Further, good quality, well tested code means science results are easier to verify, share, and update. More information on the Software Carpentry project can be found <http://software-carpentry.org>. The AAS 225 Software Carpentry bootcamp consists of short tutorials alternating with hands-on practical exercises and will cover the core software skills needed build, use, validate, and share software in astronomy: Saturday’s tutorials will comprise shell automation, basic python programming, and unit testing; Sunday’s sessions will shift to focus on advanced python, including numerical and astronomy oriented computing, and version control. Registration is for both days. The target audience for the bootcamp consists of graduate students and early career scientists. The Software Carpentry @ AAS 225 Bootcamp will be run by a set of three certified instructors and a team of helpers. Participants will be required to bring laptops and to install software in advance of the workshop. Some basic familiarity with shell based computing was assumed in setting the bootcamp schedule. See also a FAQ at http://software-carpentry.org/faq.html for more information.
Event Type: Workshop
Organizer: August A. Muench
Location: 609 (Convention Center)
Sunday
Software Carpentry Bootcamp, 9:00-5:00, Day 2; see description above
Astropy Tutorial, Sunday, 8:00-11:00, organized by Perry Greenfield
This tutorial will cover the features and capabilities of Astropy and affiliated packages.
Event Type: Splinter Meeting
Organizer: Perry Greenfield
Location: 612 (Convention Center)
SciCoder@AAS: Intro to Databases for Astronomers, Sunday, 9:00-5:00, organized by Demitri Muna
The volume of data available to astronomers today is enormous. The standard pattern of working with flat files doesn’t scale to what’s available now, let alone with the increasing amount of data that is coming. Every astronomer should have the skills to work with databases both for their own data sets and what is publicly available. This workshop will teach how a database is designed, how to create your own, how to populate it with data, how to query that data, how to work with other databases, and how to write scripts against a database. Exercises and examples will be geared to astronomical data but will be applicable to nearly any data. Participants should have a basic comfort level with Python and will be required to install some software on their laptops before the workshop. The workshop will be presented by Demitri Muna (Ohio State University), creator of the SciCoder workshop, and Alex Hagen (Pennsylvania State University).
Event Type: Workshop
Organizer: Demitri Muna
Location: 607 (Convention Center)
Astrostatistics, Sunday, 9:30-6:00, organized by Eric Feigelson
The fields of astronomy and statistics diverged in the 20th century so that astronomers are often not well informed about the wealth of powerful modern methodologies developed by statisticians. Statistics is needed for: characterizing astronomical images, spectra and lightcurves; inferring properties of underlying populations from limited samples; linking astronomical observations to astrophysical theories; and many other aspects of data and science analysis. An additional difficulty has been the inaccessibility of software implementing modern statistical methods for most astronomers. Fortunately, a large, integrated and user-friendly public domain software system has emerged in recent years to implement modern methods. R with its >5000 add-on CRAN packages has >100,000 statistical functionalities, extensive graphics, links to other languages, and more. Over 100 recipe books and extensive on-line support provide guidance for the sophisticated R user. The AAS astrostatistics tutorials are presented by astronomer Eric D. Feigelson and statistician G. Jogesh Babu, authors of the textbook `Modern Statistical Methods for Astronomy with R Applications’ that won the PROSE Award for best astronomy book of 2012. Participants should bring laptops with R installed (http://www.r-project.org). R scripts and astronomical datasets will be provided. Schedule for Sunday January 4: 9:30-10:30 Introduction to astrostatistics (lecture) 10:30-11:30 Fundamentals of statistical inference (lecture) 11:30-12:30 Introduction to R (tutorial) — Lunch (not provided) — 2:00-3:00 Density estimation or data smoothing (tutorial) 3:00-4:00 Fitting models to data (lecture) 4:00-5:00 Multivariate clustering and classification (tutorial)
Event Type: Workshop
Organizer: Eric Feigelson
Location: 618/619 (Convention Center)
Collaborating Online with GitHub and Other Tools, Sunday, 12:00-5:00, organized by August Muench
Distributed collaboration is a hallmark of modern international astronomical research. We collaborate on everything from software development to paper and grant writing to sharing new results, plots, and data files. The goal of this workshop to provide new tools and techniques for productive efficient collaboration online. This workshop will begin with a hands on tutorial of GitHub. This will include reviewing distributed version control systems and learning collaboration workflows using the GitHub system. During the second part of the workshop we will explore an array of other online tools, ranging from cloud storage (DropBox, Google Drive) to collaborative document creation (Google Documents, online LaTeX editors) to feature tracking platforms (Trello, Jira) and much more. We intend to provide concrete workflows and to imbue you with tips and tricks for using these online tools in your research groups. The target audience for the workshop consists of astronomers at all points in their careers. Presenters will include Arfon Smith <https://github.com/arfon>, PhD Astronomer turned Zooniverse developer turned Github Science head, Brent Beer, a GitHub Trainer, and August Muench (Smithsonian). Participants will be required to bring laptops and to install software in advance of the workshop. Familiarity with git or other version control systems is not a prerequisite.
Event Type: Workshop
Organizer: August A. Muench
Location: 303 (Convention Center)
Tuesday
232. Licensing Astrophysics Codes: What You Need to Know, Tuesday, 2:00-3:30
Research in astronomy is increasingly dependent on software methods and astronomers are increasingly required to share their codes; those who write software need to choose a license that delineates whether, when and how others may use and extend this software. Building on comments and questions about licensing in the January 2014 AAS special session “Astrophysics Code Sharing II: The Sequel”, this session, organized by the Astrophysics Source Code Library (ASCL) and AAS’s Working Group on Astronomical Software (WGAS), and the Moore-Sloan Data Science Environment, explores why providing an explicit license for software is important, explains different common licenses, examines intellectual property concerns common to universities, and provides information on restrictions that arise from ITAR. A panel of speakers will discuss code licensing, share considerations that arise when choosing a license, and benefits of the licenses they chose. Institutional and governmental concerns about intellectual property, its licensing, use, and release, will also be covered. The floor will then be open for discussion and questions.
Session Type: Special Session
Organizer: Alice Allen
Chair: Frossie Economou
Moderator: Alberto Accomazzi
Location: 615 (Convention Center)
232.01. Copy-left and Copy-right, Jacob VanderPlas
232.02. University tech transfer perspective on software licensing, Laura Dorsey
232.03. Relicensing the Montage Image Mosaic Engine, G. B. Berriman
232.04. Export Controls on Astrophysical Simulation Codes, Daniel Whalen
232.05. Why licensing is just the first step, Arfon M. Smith
232.06. Licenses in the wild, Daniel Foreman-Mackey
Open Discussion moderated by Alberto Accomazzi
Software Publication Special Interest Group (SPSIG) Inaugural Meeting, Tuesday, 3:45-4:45
This first meeting of the to-be-formed-at-AAS225 Software Publication Special Interest Group (SPSIG) is open to all interested parties. The main topic of discussion at this meeting will be software citation.
Session Type: Special Interest Group meeting
Organizer: Alice Allen
Location: 615 (Convention Center)
Wednesday
Catalogs, Surveys, and Computation Posters, Wednesday, 9:00-5:30
336.34. A Pipeline for High Resolution Radio Images
Brianna P. Thomas; Alison B. Peck; Jacqueline Hodge; Anthony J. Beasley
336.35. ADMIT: ALMA Data Mining Toolkit
Douglas N. Friedel; Lisa Xu; Leslie Looney; Peter J. Teuben; Marc W. Pound; Kevin P. Rauch; Lee G. Mundy; Jeffrey S. Kern
336.36. Overview of the SOFIA Data Processing System: A generalized system for manual and automatic data processing at the SOFIA Science Center
Ralph Shuping; Robert Krzaczek; William D. Vacca; Miguel Charcos-Llorens; William T. Reach; Rosemary Alles; Melanie Clarke; Riccardo Melchiorri; James T. Radomski; Sachindev S. Shenoy; David Sandel; Eric Omelian
336.37. A Prototype External Event Broker for LSST
Gabriella E. Alvarez; Keivan Stassun; Dan Burger; Robert Siverd; Donald Cox
336.39. Simulating Optical Surveys with the LSST Software Stack
Scott Daniel; K. S. Krughoff; Peter Yoachim; R. Lynne Jones; Yusra AlSayyad; Bryce Kalmbach; Andrew J. Connolly; Zeljko Ivezic
336.40. The LSST Metrics Analysis Framework (MAF)
R. Lynne Jones; Peter Yoachim; Srinivasan Chandrasekharan; Andrew J. Connolly; Kem H. Cook; Zeljko Ivezic; K. S. Krughoff; Catherine E. Petry; Stephen T. Ridgway
336.41. Analyzing Simulated LSST Surveys With MAF
Peter Yoachim; R. Lynne Jones; Srinivasan Chandrasekharan; Andrew J. Connolly; Kem H. Cook; Zeljko Ivezic; K. S. Krughoff; Catherine E. Petry; Stephen T. Ridgway
336.42. Building POCS: An open source observatory control system for amateur telescopes used by the PANOPTES project for the detection of extrasolar planets
Wilfred T. Gee; Josh Walawender; Mike Butterfield; Olivier Guyon; Nemanja Jovanovic
336.43. Adaptive Optics Images of the Galactic Center: Using Empirical Noise-maps to Optimize Image Analysis
Saundra Albers; Gunther Witzel; Leo Meyer; Breann Sitarski; Anna Boehle; Andrea M. Ghez
336.44. Recovering Astrophysical Signals Lost in Noise: Light Curves of Background Objects in Kepler Data
Rebecca L. Bowers; Joshua Pepper; Michael Abdul-Masih; Andrej Prsa
336.45. An Exploration Tool for Very Large Spectrum Data Sets
Duane F. Carbon; Christopher Henze
336.46. Understanding and Using the Fermi Science Tools
Joseph Asercion
336.47. Fact Checking LIGO’s Radiometer Code with Simulated LIGO Data
Samantha E. Thrush
336.48. AstroML: “better, faster, cheaper” towards state-of-the-art data mining and machine learning
Zeljko Ivezic; Andrew J. Connolly; Jacob Vanderplas
336.49. Bayesian Identification of Emission–Line Galaxies with Photometric Equivalent Widths
Andrew S. Leung; Eric J. Gawiser; Viviana Acquaviva
336.50. Statistical Computing for Galaxy Modeling and Residual Detection
Sean McLaughlin; Robert Brunner
336.51. Separating Stars and Galaxies Probabilistically Based on Color
Victoria Strait
336.52. Visualizing SPH Cataclysmic Variable Accretion Disk Simulations with Blender
Brian R. Kent; Matthew A. Wood
336.53. Computer analysis of digital sky surveys using citizen science and manual classification
Evan Kuminski; Lior Shamir
336.55. Improved Functionality and Curation Support in the ADS
Alberto Accomazzi; Michael J. Kurtz; Edwin A. Henneken; Carolyn S. Grant; Donna Thompson; Roman Chyla; Alexandra Holachek; Vladimir Sudilovsky; Stephen S. Murray
336.56. Online Activity Around Scholarly Astronomy Literature – A Discussion of Altmetrics
Edwin A. Henneken; Alberto Accomazzi; Michael J. Kurtz; Donna Thompson; Carolyn S. Grant; Stephen S. Murray
336.57. Astrophysics Source Code Library — Now even better!
Alice Allen; Judy Schmidt; Bruce Berriman; Kimberly DuPrie; Robert J. Hanisch; Jessica D. Mink; Robert J. Nemiroff; Lior Shamir; Keith Shortridge; Mark B. Taylor; Peter J. Teuben; John F. Wallin
336.59. Beyond The Prime Directive: The MAST Discovery Portal and High Level Science Products
Scott W. Fleming; Faith Abney; Tom Donaldson; Theresa Dower; Dorothy A. Fraquelli; Anton M. Koekemoer; Karen Levay; Jacob Matuskey; Brian McLean; Lee Quick; Anthony Rogers; Bernie Shiao; Randy Thompson; Shui-Ay Tseng; Geoff Wallace; Richard L. White
315 Astroinformatics and Astrostatistics in Astronomical Research: Steps Towards Better Curricula, Wednesday, 10:00-11:30
The AAS Working Group on Astroinformatics and Astrostatistics hereby proposes a Special Session for the 225th AAS meeting in Seattle which will highlight the importance of data analytics training in astronomy, both for the sake of astronomical research and in order to make astronomy graduates more employable. Although astronomy and astrophysics are witnessing dramatic increases in data volume as detectors, telescopes, and computers become ever more powerful, the traditional training of astronomy and physics students is not providing skills to handle such voluminous and complex data sets. Equally worrisome, research funds and hiring options in astronomy are diminishing; in particular, a number of candidates for permanent (or steady) jobs significantly exceeds the job availability. As a result many of astronomy graduates have transitioned out of astronomy to work in areas where their analytic skills become highly valuable. Invited talks by a recent astronomy Ph.D. graduate who transitioned to industry, and an industry representative, will critically compare academic and industrial environments.The main goals of the proposed session are to discuss ways to improve Big Data training and research in astronomy, as well as to explore the connections between data science in astronomy and in the other research or technology areas where astronomy postdocs or recent graduates could excel and compete. We will use moderated panel method to facilitate discussion of graduate curriculum at Astronomy Departments, and invited talks to highlight connections to industry.
Session Type: Special Session
Organizer: Zeljko Ivezic
Organizer: Aneta Siemiginowska
Location: 620 (Convention Center)
315.01. Working on interesting problems, Arfon M. Smith
315.02. Astronomer to Data Scientist, Jessica Kirkpatrick
Panel Discussion
The SKA Telescope: Global Project, Revolutionary Science, Extreme Computing Challenges, Wednesday, 12:30-3:30
The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is one of the most awe-inspiring and audacious science and engineering projects of the 21st Century. With its hundreds of thousands of antennas spread across Africa and Australia, the SKA will have unrivalled scope in observations and is designed to address fundamental questions about the earliest stages of the Universe, such as star formation, dark energy, gravity and life itself. When fully operational in the early 2020s, the SKA will produce 10 times the data of the current global internet. Processing this vast quantity of data will require very high performance central supercomputers capable of in excess of 100 petaflops of raw processing power: about three times more powerful than the most powerful supercomputer in 2013. In addition to developing this high performance computing hardware and software capability, the project must also address the incredibly complex tasks of signal processing, data transfer, storage and curation, and data manipulation. To develop these revolutionary technologies and drive tomorrow’s groundbreaking science, effective global partnerships between governments, academia, and industry are becoming essential. With their long-standing tradition of radio astronomy, the US can bring much expertise to such global partnerships, while at the same time gaining strategic access to world-class instruments. This session will be divided in 2 parts: – Science: Through the case study of the SKA precursor telescopes MWA, ASKAP and MeerKAT, and of the first-class observatories LOFAR and JVLA, we will see how major science questions are already being touched upon, paving the way for the revolutionary capabilities of the SKA. We will finally examine how a project the scale of the SKA will push the frontiers of scientific knowledge.- Computing: The sheer amount of data collected by the SKA will drive fundamental shifts in science-driven technology with daily-life applications in the areas of data transport, data storage, high-performance computing, and algorithm design. We will first present the SKA global computing and technological challenges, and then give the floor to experts from High Performance Computing industry who will provide their views on how they aim to tackle these challenges and how the SKA is driving technology development in a number of domains.
Event Type: Splinter Meeting
Organizer: Tyler L. Bourke
Location: 4C-4 (Convention Center)
332. Catalogs/Surveys/Computation – UVOIR, Wednesday, 3:10-3:20 PM
Session Type: Oral Session
Chair: Steven A. Rodney
Location: 620 (Convention Center)
332.09. Targeted-mode pipeline for the Evryscope: a minute cadence, 10,000-square-degree FoV, gigapixel-scale telescope
Octavi Fors Aldrich; Nicholas M. Law; Philip J. Wulfken; Jeffrey Ratzloff
Thursday
434. Computation, Data Handling and Other Matters Posters, Thursday, 9:00-2:00
434.01. Spherical harmonic transit analysis with PAPER
Jason Ling; Saul A. Kohn; James E. Aguirre
434.02. Time-domain Surveys and Data Shift: Case Study at the intermediate Palomar Transient Factory
Umaa Rebbapragada; Brian Bue; Przemyslaw R. Wozniak
434.03. A new ultra-fast Moving Object Discovery Engine for iPTF, ZTF, and beyond
Frank J. Masci; Adam Waszczak; Russ Laher; James M. Bauer; Thomas A. Prince; George Helou; Shrinivas R. Kulkarni
434.04. Comparing the Mass Functions of Simulated Galaxies
Nicholas Miller; Ariyeh Maller; M.K Ryan Joung; Julien Devriendt; James Bullock
434.05. A New Laboratory for MM-/Sub-MM-Wave Characterization of Cosmic Dust Analogs
Samuel Birsa; Huy Do; Frederick Williams; Lunjun Liu; Ryan Schonert; Thushara Perera
434.06. IPAC Firefly package goes open source
Xiuqin Wu; William Roby; Tatiana Goldina; Loi Ly
Hack Day, Thursday, 10:00-7:00
A day to work intensively on collaborative projects. A wide variety of projects will be undertaken and will be everything from software development and coding to creative outreach projects. Projects that take advantage of the unique gathering of enthusiasm and expertise at the Winter AAS Meeting are particularly encouraged. Hack ideas and participants will be solicited before and during the meeting. Participants can either lead a project or join a project and should plan on focusing primarily on only one hack. In addition, we ask participants to commit to hacking for the majority of the day. Registration is encouraged to facilitate pre-meeting coordination, but not required.
Event Type: Workshop
Organizer: Kelle L. Cruz
Chair: David W. Hogg
Location: 4C-2 (Convention Center)
ASCL at .Astronomy!
The ASCL is at .Astronomy (“dot astronomy”), which officially starts tomorrow morning. Three days of unconference, discussion, sessions, hacking, ideas, collaborating, fun, cool buttons, and, rumor has it, Belgian chocolate, in the magnificent city of Chicago. Follow along on Twitter, hashtag #dotastro!