Dark Energy Survey

Felipe Menanteau, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Usage Details

The Dark Energy Survey (DES) is about to complete its five-year observing program. This consists of a 5,000 square-degree wide field survey in 5-band optical bands of the southern sky and a 30 square-degree deep supernova survey with the aim of understanding the nature of dark energy and the accelerating Universe. DES uses the 3 square-degree CCD camera (DECam), installed at the prime focus of the Blanco 4-m to record the positions and shapes of 300 million galaxies up to redshift 1.4. During a normal night of observations, DES produces about 1 TB of raw data, including science and calibration images, which are transported automatically from Chile to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in Urbana, Illinois to be archived and reduced. The DES data management system (DESDM) is in charge of the processing, calibration and archiving of these data into science-ready data products for analysis by the DES Collaboration and the public. In this proposal we request 460 KnH on Blue Waters to run the full and final five year DES dataset over the weak lensing DESDM production pipeline to precisely measure the shapes and brightness of over 300 millions galaxies in order to create the most accurate mapping of the dark matter structure in the universe. This will represent the largest cosmological dataset until LSST comes online in the next decade.