Sky & Telescope - September 2016 - 17

A Nightly Ritual

92,000,000

Sky Survey Projects
Total Data Volume
Height of Mont Blanc

LSST
~200 PB
expected

4,000,000

LSST raw data
over 10 years
~55 PB

1,095,000
1 million

Pan-STARRS
~40 PB expected

800,000

Freedom Tower
1,776 feet

SDSS
40 TB

500,000

Number of stacked Blu-ray discs

Once the LSST survey starts - currently scheduled for
October 2022 - the project team will handle initial processing so that astronomers can quickly and easily make
use of the observations to do science. This upfront work
will comprise basic data analysis, including characterizing sources in terms of their color, shape, motion on the
sky, and time variability. The LSST team will also ensure
consistent data quality and assemble the object catalog.
Much of this standard pipeline processing will be highly
automated: the data volumes are so massive that they preclude human examination of all but the tiniest fraction.
The LSST team can't get behind on processing the raw
data, because if they do, they'll never catch up. To help
protect against this, the project plans to staff two primary
data centers, the main one at the National Center for
Supercomputing Applications in Urbana, Illinois, and a
backup center in Lyons, France. It will also furnish multiple copies of the full data, and each year a new run will
reprocess the entire available survey data set.
But LSST leaders are confident that such advance
efforts will not present an obstacle, nor will storage. As
the project explains on its website, "While LSST is making a novel use of advanced information technology, it is
not taking the risk of pushing the expected technology
to the limit." LSST will have two redundant, 40-gigabyteper-second optical-fiber links from La Serena to Urbana.
Such dedicated long-haul networks mean that even
transferring that amount of information is not expected

Square Kilometer Array
~4,600 PB expected

100,000

SkyMapper
500 TB

10,000

S&T: GREGG DINDERMAN, SOURCE: Y. ZHANG & Y. ZHAO / DATA SCIENCE JOURNAL 2015

AERIAL EDIFICES Below: The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope under construction in Chile, March 2016. Above: New York's 1,776-foot
Freedom Tower is dwarfed by the stacks of Blu-ray discs, each about 0.05 inch (1.2 mm) thick, that would be needed to store the total
data volume from the three largest wide-field survey projects. Note the comparatively minuscule stack required for the SDSS data set.

LSST PROJECT / NSF / AURA

Sk yandTelescope.com September 2016

17



http://www.SkyandTelescope.com

Sky & Telescope - September 2016

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Sky & Telescope - September 2016

 Contents
Sky & Telescope - September 2016 - Cover1
Sky & Telescope - September 2016 - Cover2
Sky & Telescope - September 2016 - 1
Sky & Telescope - September 2016 -  Contents
Sky & Telescope - September 2016 - 3
Sky & Telescope - September 2016 - A
Sky & Telescope - September 2016 - B
Sky & Telescope - September 2016 - 4
Sky & Telescope - September 2016 - 5
Sky & Telescope - September 2016 - 6
Sky & Telescope - September 2016 - 7
Sky & Telescope - September 2016 - 8
Sky & Telescope - September 2016 - 9
Sky & Telescope - September 2016 - 10
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Sky & Telescope - September 2016 - 41
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Sky & Telescope - September 2016 - Cover3
Sky & Telescope - September 2016 - Cover4
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