Scientific
Applications:
WIRELESS GRID BOOSTS SUPERNOVA
SEARCH TO STELLAR FIRST YEAR
In results presented this week at the 2003 meeting of the American
Astronomical Society (AAS) in Seattle, astrophysicist Greg Aldering and
colleagues report that their supernova factory project has discovered an
unprecedented 34 new supernovae in its first year.
The accomplishment would not have been possible without the National
Science
Foundation (NSF)-supported high-performance wireless network link to Palomar
Observatory.
"This has been the best rookie year for any supernova search project,"
Aldering said. The Nearby Supernova Factory, led by Aldering at Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), is seeking out 300 new exploding stars to
be used as standard distance markers in future studies to measure the change
in the universe's rate of expansion and thereby determine its dark energy
content.
"We're completely dependent on the wireless network because we have to sift
through huge amounts of images," Aldering said, "and we need those images as
soon as possible after they're seen by the telescope."
The high-performance Wireless Research and Education Network (HPWREN), a
project of the University of California, San Diego, provides Caltech's Palomar
Observatory with a high-speed link to the Internet. The link made it possible
to amass the quartermillion images -- six terabytes of compressed data --
analyzed
by Aldering and the Nearby Supernova Factory team in 2002.
Funded by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency that supports
basic science and engineering research and infrastructure, HPWREN makes it
possible to send images almost instantly from the 48-inch Oschin Telescope at
Palomar's remote mountaintop site to a storage facility at the Department of
Energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), located
at LBNL in Berkeley, CA. Each image is 16 megapixels, and three images are
captured every 30 seconds. Fifty gigabytes, or nearly 80 CD-ROMs' worth, of
raw data crosses the HPWREN link nightly.
Thanks to HPWREN, the project is likely to find many more supernovae in
subsequent years, allowing the study of rare supernovae with unusual
properties, which can better reveal how supernovae work, according to
Aldering. The eventual collection of supernovae will be made available to the
astronomy community.
"Greg's supernova findings clearly illustrate the benefits of astronomers
and
computer network researchers partnering as a team, and we are really pleased
to see how much high-performance networks enable our collaborating scientists
and educators," said HPWREN principal investigator Hans-Werner Braun of UCSD's
San Diego Supercomputer Center. "We hope to continue our work together and
intend to enhance the data communications bandwidth even more, as Greg and
others have indicated that they can make even more great discoveries if they
have more bandwidth available to them."
The supernova factory pipeline starts with images being collected by the
NASA-funded Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking (NEAT) project. The images are sent
across the 45-megabit-per-second HPWREN wireless link and on to LBNL, where
NERSC's computers process the images to discover and rank supernova
candidates. Eventually the pipeline will automate the entire discovery and
confirmation process. Once a supernova is discovered from the Palomar images,
follow-up observations will be obtained by remote control of the University of
Hawaii's 88-inch telescope on Mauna Kea. The Hawaii observations will be
shipped by Internet for image processing at a supercomputing center in France
and then sent to NERSC for analysis.
"If we can do this quickly enough, we can even ask the Hawaii and Palomar
telescopes to get more data, say, for a very rare type of transient object,"
Aldering said. "This is all supposed to happen automatically while we are
asleep, although it will take a while to reach a reliable level of
automation." The HPWREN team, led by Braun and Frank Vernon at the Scripps
Institution of Oceanography, is prototyping and evaluating a non-commercial,
high-performance, wide-area wireless network.
The network includes backbone nodes on the UCSD campus and a number of
hard-to-reach areas in San Diego County, including the Palomar and Mt. Laguna
observatories, Native American communities, and several remote science field
stations.
The poster on the Nearby Supernova Factory will be presented at the AAS
meeting in Seattle during Session 56, "Supernovae Potpourri," on Jan. 7, 2003,
9:20 a.m. - 6:30 p.m.
The National Science Foundation is an independent federal agency that
supports
fundamental research and education across all fields of science and
engineering, with an annual budget of nearly $5 billion.
NSF funds reach all 50 states through grants to nearly 2,000 universities
and
institutions. Each year, NSF receives about 30,000 competitive requests for
funding, and makes about 10,000 new funding awards. NSF also awards over $200
million in professional and service contracts yearly.
High-Performance Wireless Research and Education Network: http://hpwren.ucsd.edu
Nearby Supernova Factory: http://snfactory.lbl.gov
Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking: http://neat.jpl.nasa.gov
Program contact: Tom Greene 703-292-8948 or email: tgreene@nsf.gov
Print-ready digital photos available on request.
Contact: David Hart at The National Science Foundation 703-292-8070 or
email: dhart@nsf.gov
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