Ashish Mahabal, Ajit Kembhavi, Roy Williams, Sharmad Navelkar
Astronomy has always been at the forefront of information technology, moving
from the era of photographic plates, to digital snapshots and now to digital
movies of the sky. This has brought about a data explosion with multi- terabyte
surveys already happening and upcoming petabyte scale surveys. By scanning the
sky repeatedly and automatically, astronomers find rapidly changing phenomena -
transients - of a great variety. Surveys like the Catalina Real-time Transient
Survey (CRTS) publish details on the transients right away since many of these
fade in a matter of minutes and it is important to get additional observations
in order to determine their nature. This involves being able to combine a
variety of datasets, small and large, in real-time. With networks like the Asia
Pacific Advanced Network (APAN) and India's National Knowledge Network (NKN) we
are in the realm where such a data transfer is possible in real time across
continents. Here we describe the live demonstration we were able to carry out
at data transfer speeds of several hundred megabits per second (Mbps) between
California Institute of Technology (Caltech, USA) and the Inter-University
Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA, India). This project illustrates
how machines can make rapid decisions in response to complex, heterogeneous
data, using sophisticated software and networking. While the broader impact
covers all aspects of society (disaster response, power grids, earthquakes, and
many more), we have used astronomy to show how the APAN and NKN make this
possible.
View original:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.1281
No comments:
Post a Comment