High Performance Computing in Observational Astronomy: Requirements and Challenges
12-16 October 2009
Pune, India.

Poster: PDF

The theme of this meeting will be to discuss computationally intensive techniques important for different branches of astronomy.  These techniques are increasingly being applied and planned for data collection, real-time and off-line analysis, and interpretation of results.  Examples of such techniques include, among many others, software correlation of interferometric signals, dynamic beam forming and interference rejection, adaptive optics control for multi-segment telescopes, coded mask image analysis, matched filtering of gravitational wave signal, deconvolution and foreground subtraction of CMB maps, automated transient search etc.

Given the development and plans for large international astronomical facilities like the upgraded GMRT, eVLA, LOFAR, ASKAP, MeerKAT (and eventually the SKA) in radio, various new giant multi-segment mirror telescope projects in optical, new observatories like ASTROSAT in UV/x-ray, we feel that such a meeting will be well timed and will provide an appropriate forum for exchange of ideas and plans for handling the massive computing tasks associated with such large projects.  In particular, we feel that participants from different wave band regimes will benefit by possible cross-fertilization of ideas.  We expect significant participation from academia as well as the IT industry, and prominent researchers from both domains will be invited speakers at this meeting.

VisIVO ON-LINE TUTORIAL
25 June 2009 - 3:00 pm (CET)

INAF-Astrophysical Observatory of Catania (Italy)
in collaboration with
Cineca  (Italy), University of Portsmouth (United Kingdom),
Cometa Consortium (Italy) and INFN (National Institute of Nuclear
Physics) Sezione di Catania (Italy)

VisIVO  is an integrated suite of tools and services specifically designed for the Virtual Observatory. This suite constitutes a software framework for effective visual discovery in currently available (and next-generation) very large-scale astrophysical datasets coming from real-world observations or numerical simulations. VisIVO consists of VisiVO Desktop - a standalone application for interactive visualization on standard PC platforms, VisIVO Server - a grid enabled platform for ultra high performance visualization and VisIVO Web - a custom designed web portal supporting services based on the VisIVO Server functionality.

This tutorial will provide hands-on training at introductory level using the core features of VisIVO Desktop, VisIVO Server and VisIVO Web for effective astronomical visualisation. There will be a single training session with planned duration of three hours.

The deadline for registering for this event is Saturday 20 June 2009. Participation in this tutorial is completely free, no fees are required. Accepted participants will receive all necessary information for connecting to the event’s www pages. The agenda and a web link for registration are available at http://visivo.oact.inaf.it, please follow the link entitled “Second VisIVO On Line Tutorial.”

VOEvent is the emerging International Virtual Observatory standard for distributing timely notifications of transient celestial events. The VOEvent specification provides a method for alerting subscribers to celestial phenomena in need of rapid, often automatic, observational follow-up. The IVOA VOEvent working group is responsible for continuing to develop the specification and for motivating the development of conforming systems, interoperable with each other and with prior community resources.

A common vision for VOEvent was forged at the first VOEvent workshop at Caltech in April 2005. The fruits of that workshop included v1.0 of the VOEvent XML specification, as well as example packets and a schema for validating those packets. Initial transport prototypes have been designed and deployed, and as a result actual event streams from such phenomena as gamma ray bursts are being captured as conforming VOEvent packets.

NVO is cosponsoring the second VOEvent workshop to be held in Tucson on December 5-6, 2005. Please see the meeting website for details. We hope to continue rapid progress on resolving thorny technical issues such as the proper semantics for specifying astronomical space-time coordinates or for specifying the classification of astronomical objects and processes. In addition, renewed attention will be directed to understanding the science drivers common to all time domain astronomy. VOEvent does not exist in a vacuum, and seeks to both benefit from, and provide evolutionary benefit to, prior astronomical transient event alert systems.

The IVOA VOEvent workshop held at Caltech in Pasadena, California concluded April 14, 2005 with an agreement by an international team on an information infrastructure to support the burgeoning field of event-based astronomy.

As we measure the sky with ever-increasing depth and breadth, the Universe seems filled with violent, distant explosions, trans-Neptunian objects, and asteroids that come all too close to the Earth. The detection and understanding of these transient and immediate phenomena requires new kinds of surveys, fast data reduction, and and fast response by the astronomical community. Providers of the event stream include the Swift and Integral satellites for gamma-ray bursts, supernova “factories”, and synoptic surveys coming online now and planned for the future. There are robotic telescope projects that will respond in seconds to these discovery events, giving a comprehensive, panchromatic view. Until now, events have been distributed in various formats and protocols, so that aggregation and federation have been difficult. Users of such events have been forced to create specialized software to receive such streams. The objective of the VOEvent working group is to build an open standard for exchanging messages about these immediate astronomical events, including publication, archiving, query, subscription, and aggregation.

The VOEvent standard has been agreed in rough form at the workshop, and includes the following features:

• Buy-in for the new standard from projects that include: GCN, LSST, Pan-STARRS, Palomar-Quest, LIGO, eStars, Raptor, Pairitel, ATEL, and Hands-On Universe.
• The possibility of simplicity (the mantra “Publisher, RA, Dec, Magnitude”), and also the possibility of positional and semantic accuracy,
• Division into sections: Who, Wherewhen, What, How, Hypothesis, and Citations.
• Contact and publisher information so that consumers of events can restrict event subscription to trusted sources,
• Rich semantic content through the IVOA UCD vocabulary [2] to express the meaning of project-specific data in an interoperable way,
• Integration with the IVOA Space-Time Coordinate schema[3], so that locations and timing can be defined either very simply or with sophistication and precision,
• Integration with the Remote Telescope Markup Language (RTML) so that VOEvents can be rapidly converted to scheduling instructions for a telescope,
• A vocabulary of event types that can be used to express a hypothesis about the astronomical meaning of the event, a way to express association with, and positional offset from a given object,
• A global identifier structure for events so they can be cited into the future,
• Message types such as Discovery, Followup, Retraction, and Supercede to provide a coherent picture of distributed knowledge about a discovery,
• Modular XML syntax, allowing the use of pre-built tools for parsing, storage, and filtering, as well as a clear path to extensibility.

Results of the meeting included a number of action items, such as initial implementations and documentation, and produced two “sample” event documents. The report of the workshop, including presentations and the sample VOEvents can be found on the VOEvent Workshop website.