Andrew Drake, CACR

We have performed an extensive search for RR Lyrae among the 500 million sources observed by the Catalina Surveys. We detect ~26,000 type-AB RR Lyrae (of which 20,000 are new discoveries) from a region spanning 3/4 of the sky. By determining accurate distances to the stars, we investigate the spatial distribution of structures within the Milky Way halo. Combining the RR Lyrae distances with SDSS spectroscopy we are able accurately trace the velocities and metallicities of hundreds of sources within the Sagittarius tidal streams system. We find the first strong evidence for a dense tidal stream that overlaps the Sagittarius system to distances beyond 100kpc, yet remains unexplained by any existing model.

“General purpose GPU programming by CUDA—an introductory tutorial”
Dr. Hailiang Zhang, Caltech Center for Advanced Computing Research (CACR)

Abstract:
In recent years, various fields of large-scale scientific computations
have greatly benefit from the massively parallel programming.  This talk
presents a brief introduction and tutorial on the state-of-the-art
general-purpose GPU programming platform—CUDA.  The GPU device
architecture, memory hierarchy, and the general CUDA programming model
will be introduced.  The CUDA numerical schemes of some vector and matrix
operations will be demonstrated as examples.  Some CUDA applications on
molecular and biophysical modeling will be presented.  The standard CUDA
toolkit libraries and some third party APIs will also be introduced.

“Looking for Nuggets in Massive Data Streams”
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
9:00am – 12:30pm
Hameetman Auditorium, Cahill Building

This short course is being held in conjunction with the KISS study “Digging Deeper: Algorithms for Computationally-Limited Searches in Astronomy.”

This series of talks will review some of the tools and techniques used for detection and classification on transient signals in massive data streams in astronomy, e.g., searches for gravitational wave sources, or transient events in synoptic sky surveys.  The focus of this short course is on advanced data mining and statistical techniques and algorithms.

Speakers include:

09:15 – 10:15  Signal analysis and parameter estimation in gravitational wave astronomy, Badri Krishnan (AEI)
10:15 – 10:45  Keynote talk:  New Developments in Time Series Analysis, Jeff Scargle (NASA Ames)
10:45 – 11:15  Coffee break
11:15 – 11:45  Automated Classification of Transients, Ashish Mahabal (Caltech)
11:45 – 12:15  Machine Learning applications in Time Domain Astronomy, Pavlos Protopapas (CfA)

The short course will be videotaped and made available on the KISS website within two weeks after the workshop is completed.

Seating is limited and is available on a first come, first served basis – and no registration is required. An informal lunch is provided for all short course attendees.

Please see http://www.kiss.caltech.edu for more details.

A (Hypothetical) Data to Discovery Engine
Mark Stalzer, Caltech – CACR

Description/Abstract:
Moore’s law works for semiconductor-based detectors and there is an increasing flood of data being generated in astronomy, high energy physics, biology, and other sciences. Computation is essential for both (1) making predictions from theory and (2) the analysis of data from experiments. Is there a way to architecturally balance both needs in a high performance computing (HPC) system?

HPC systems are typically constructed from easily available parts, just organized differently and scaled to process extreme workloads. The most power efficient petascale machine as of 2010 is Roadrunner at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Another interesting machine is the Apple iPad which uses very low power System on a Chip/Package on Package technologies. This talk explores the question of “what happens when you cross Roadrunner with iPads”? The result is a high level of integration between computation and storage on a single server blade, called a Flashblade, with 100x-1,000x performance improvements for some data-centric applications. The Flashblade architecture, expected performance, programming, and scaling with advancing technology are discussed.

(See publication page for PDF link)

California Institute of Technology
Cahill Center for Astronomy & Astrophysics
Pasadena, CA, USA – June 16-19, 2010

CACR is co-sponsoring an international conference on the emerging field of AstroInformatics. AstroInformatics is envisioned as a broader intellectual, organizational, and funding environment, within which Virtual Observatories serve as particular institutions and provide fundamental functionalities and infrastructure.  Our goal is to both empower and engage the astronomy and applied computer science communities in developing and deploying new tools and methods, enabled by the computation and information technologies.

The conference will bring together a broad range of experts in these and related fields, and address a wide range of topics, including knowledge extraction from massive and complex data sets, trends in computing technologies, visualization, novel scholarly communication, collaboration, education tools and environments, new and emerging modalities for scientific publishing, community development and sociological changes prompted by the evolving scientific methodology and technology, inter-disciplinary connections, etc.  The last day of the conference will be devoted to the Practical AstroSemantics workshop.

The conference will consist of a small number of invited review talks, and panel-led discussions.  Talks will be given by several CACR staff members, including Matthew Graham, Santiago Lombeyda, and Mark Stalzer

For more information or to register, visit http://www.astro.caltech.edu/ai10

Semantic astronomy promises to expand the scientific discovery potential of exponentially growing data collections by enabling natural language querying, content-based searching, rich metadata markup and retrieval, rapid integration of diverse data collections, and machine-assisted scientific discovery.

Practical Semantic Astronomy 2009 is the second in a series of workshops first held at Caltech in February 2008.  The workshop brings together experts from a broad range of disciplines using semantic technologies, alongside practitioners experimenting with these techniques to address current problems in astroinformatics.

The Virtual Observatory is a loose planet-wide collaboration of astronomy computing projects, aiming to make available the high-volume and rich data of astronomy.  Although astronomical data is generally
well-described, it is very dispersed, so that there is a substantial data-discovery and integration problem, making it fertile ground for the sorts of semantic approaches applied with such success in other
disciplines.

In SemAst 2009, we will pair keynote speakers and astronomical use-cases, focusing broad expertise on challenging and exciting problems in astroinformatics. The keynotes will comprise of:

• Danny Ayers, Talis, UK
• Peter Fox, National Center for Atmospheric Research, USA
• Antoine Isaac, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• Amedeo Napoli, LORIA, France
• Joel Sachs, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, USA
• +1 to be confirmed

Topics of Interest

• Astronomy and solar ontologies
• Knowledgebases
• Metadata for astronomical databases
• Semantic integration
• Semantic queries and data mining
• Semantic technologies

Submission

Submissions should be in the form of an extended abstract of no more than 1 page. Abstracts should be submitted electronically with the EasyChair system.

Important Dates

• Abstract Submissions: 4 January 2009
• Paper Notification: 16 January 2009
• Early-bird Registration: 31 January 2009
• Workshop: 2-5 March 2009

Organizers

• Alasdair J G Gray, University of Glasgow, UK
• Norman Gray, University of Leicester/University of Glasgow, UK
• Iadh Ounis, University of Glasgow, UK
• Jon Ritchie, University of Glasgow, UK

Scientific Organizing Committee

• Norman Gray (Chair), University of Leicester/University of Glasgow, UK
• Kirk Borne, George Mason University, USA
• Doug Burke, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, USA
• Sebastien Derriere, Observatoire Astronomique de Strasbourg, France
• Matthew Graham, California Institute of Technology, USA
• Bob Mann, Royal Observatory, Edinburgh, UK

Further Information

More information is available from the web site
http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/workshops/semast09/
or by email to semast09 at dcs.gla.ac.uk

Giuseppe Longo
Department of Physics – University Federico II in Naples, Italy
INAF – Napoli

Due to the huge amount of data gathered by the large optical surveys and by a new generation of space borne experiments, astronomy has become a very data rich science. The exploitation of the huge amount of information contained in the astronomical archives, which has been federated and made accessible to the community through the International Virtual Observatory (VO) infrastructure, calls for the adoption of Intelligent Data Analysis (IDA) methods and tools which allow to extract patterns and trends in an almost automatic way and can find application in almost all fields of observational astronomy. The talk is therefore divided in two parts: the first one is devoted to describe how and why in the coming decades, IDA methodologies will play an increasing role in astronomy but not only. The second part will discuss the preliminary results of a Euro-VO template science case, concerning the evaluation of photometric redshifts for SDSS galaxies and QSOs and the identification of quasar candidates from combined UKIDS and SDSS data.

The SC Conference is the premier international conference for high performance computing (HPC), networking, storage and analysis. SC08 marks the 20th anniversary of the first SC Conference, then called Supercomputing, held in Orlando, Florida in 1988. It is also the 20th anniversary of the participation of the group that evolved into CACR. Visit us at Booth 751!