Assembling a Map of the Universe with Blue Waters: Shapes and mass distribution for the Dark Energy Survey

Felipe Menanteau, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Usage Details

The Dark Energy Survey (DES) has just completed its six-year observing program. This consists of a 5000 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 to understanding the nature of Dark Energy and the accelerating Universe. DES built the 3 square-degree CCD camera (DECam), now installed at the prime focus of on the Blanco 4-m, its goal, to record the positions and shapes of half billion galaxies up to redshift 1.4.

During a normal night of observations, DES produced about 1 TB of raw data, including science and calibration images, which were 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) processes, calibrates and archives these data into science-ready data products for analysis by the DES Collaboration and the public.

We will run the full and final six-year DES dataset over the weak lensing DESDM production pipeline to precisely measure the shapes and brightness of over half billion 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.