Data challenges for the Gaia Science Alerts System

Gaia is a European Space Agency (ESA) cornerstone mission due to launch late 2012. Its mission is to precisely survey over one billion sources to create an accurate three-dimensional map of the sky. The Gaia Science Alerts (GSA) System, based in the Institute of Astronomy (IoA) at Cambridge University in the UK, aims to use the daily data stream from Gaia to look for and report on transient events both from within and beyond our galaxy. The data stream will be processed in near real-time in order to provide rapid alerts to facilitate ground-based follow-up. This paper provides an overview of the Gaia Science Alerts System and highlights the data processing and storage challenges from data ingestion and event-detection to event classification and the eventual publication mechanism

Gaia transient detection efficiency: hunting for nuclear transients

We present a study of the detectability of transient events associated with galaxies for the Gaia European Space Agency astrometric mission. We simulated the on-board detections, and on-ground processing for a mock galaxy catalogue to establish the properties required for the discovery of transient events by Gaia, specifically tidal disruption events (TDEs) and supernovae (SNe). Transients may either be discovered by the on-board detection of a new source or by the brightening of a previously known source. We show that Gaia transients can be identified as new detections on-board for offsets from the host galaxy nucleus of 0.1--0.5,arcsec, depending on magnitude and scanning angle. The Gaia detection system shows no significant loss of SNe at close radial distances to the nucleus. We used the detection efficiencies to predict the number of transients events discovered by Gaia. For a limiting magnitude of 19, we expect around 1300 SNe per year: 65% SN Ia, 28% SN II and 7% SN Ibc, and ~20 TDEs per year.Comment: 17 pages, 10 figures, accepted by MNRA

Exploring OpenMP Accelerator Model in a real-life scientific application using hybrid CPU-MIC platforms

Proceedings of: Third International Workshop on Sustainable Ultrascale Computing Systems (NESUS 2016). Sofia (Bulgaria), October, 6-7, 2016.The main goal of this paper is the suitability assessment of the OpenMP Accelerator Model (OMPAM) for porting a real-life scientific application to heterogeneous platforms containing a single Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor. This OpenMP extension is supported from version 4.0 of the standard, offering an unified directive-based programming model dedicated for massively parallel accelerators. In our study, we focus on applying the OMPAM extension together with the OpenMP tasks for a parallel application which implements the numerical model of alloy solidification. To map the application efficiently on target hybrid platforms using such constructs as omp target, omp target data and omp target update, we propose a decomposition of main tasks belonging to the computational core of the studied application. In consequence, the coprocessor is used to execute the major parallel workloads, while CPUs are responsible for executing a part of the application that do not require massively parallel resources. Effective overlapping computations with data transfers is another goal achieved in this way. The proposed approach allows us to execute the whole application 3.5 times faster than the original parallel version running on two CPUs.This research was conducted with the support of COST Action IC1305 (NESUS), as well as the National Science Centre (Poland) under grant no. UMO-2011/03/B/ST6/03500. The authors are grateful to the Czestochowa University of Technology for granting access to Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors provided by the MICLAB project no. POIG.02.03.00.24-093/13 (http://miclab.pl)