Abstract

Contributed Talk - Splinter DataManage

Tuesday, 10 September 2024, 15:35   (S22)

The CCAT Data Center

Christof Buchbender
I. Physikalisches Institut, Universität zu Köln

The CCAT consortium is currently building the Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope (FYST) on Cerro Chajnantor in the Atacama Desert of Chile, at an altitude of 5600 meters. The telescope is expected to achieve first light in 2025. The consortium includes Cornell University, the University of Cologne, the University of Bonn, Max-Planck-Institut für Astrophysik, and the Canadian Atacama Telescope Consortium. Initially, FYST will be equipped with two instruments: Prime-Cam, a modular receiver featuring up to seven science modules, and the CCAT Heterodyne Array Instrument (CHAI), which will operate in the 430-510 GHz and 800-835 GHz frequency ranges. The consortium's combined expertise will be utilized to explore a variety of astrophysical topics, such as star formation, the evolution of the interstellar medium in the Milky Way and nearby galaxies, early Universe galaxies, and cosmology. During the first five years of operation, the instruments Prime-Cam and CHAI are expected to generate approximately 5 petabytes of raw data. To handle this data, the University of Cologne is establishing the "CCAT Data Center" at its Regional Computing Center (RRZK). The data center is currently developing pipelines for data transfer, storage, reduction, and quality assessment. For processing, we plan to use the new RAMSES high-performance computer at the University of Cologne. We will oversee the entire data lifecycle, from initial project definition through observations, data reduction, and creation of science-ready data products and scientific publications, all managed within a single database. This approach will allow us to track success and make necessary adjustments throughout the process. A web frontend will provide efficient data access and insights into the state of the telescope and its projects. In this talk, I will briefly introduce the CCAT project and its scientific goals and then focus on the “CCAT Data Center”. I will discuss the architecture for data transfer, management, processing, and accessibility via a web frontend. Additionally, I will address the challenges we face, such as the data transfer from Chile to Cologne and the significant processing demands of some projects.