Motivación de un entorno GRID en el área de Astrofísica (ideas)

Resolución de problemas numéricos complejos en el ámbito de la Astrofísica:

Modelos de interacción y evolución galáctica (sistemas de N cuerpos). Modelos Cosmológicos (Cosmología Numérica) Modelos Magnetohidrodinámicos, emisión radiativa, etc.

Reducción, calibración y análisis masivo de datos astrofísicos “pesados”: Creación y desarrollo de aplicaciones GRID para el tratamiento completo de datos astrofísicos (data mining).

GRID+Global Virtual Observatory: Desarrollo de un tejido GRID para almacenamiento, distribución y acceso a los archivos de información astronómica heterogénea (AstroGrid, EGSO)

Creación de una red de telescopios e instrumental “inteligente” distribuidos geográficamente y controlados de manera remota. (iAstro, eStar)

Astrophysical projects with interest in GRID

Multiwavelength observational study and modelization of compact groups of galaxies

Goal: Discriminate between the genetic characteristic of a galaxy and those produced by the neighborhood. The project studies the Compact Groups of Galaxies, where the interactions between galaxies are especially intense, refering to:

the analysis of their interestellar medium. the modelization of their present dynamical status:

With a good coverage of the phase space in the models (high number of particles, realistic conditions, etc.) and initial conditions delimited by observational study.

It’s necesary a big network of interconnected computers at very high speed, working as a parallel intensive calculation tool for the simulations and the reduction of large volumes of data.

Astrophysical projects with interest in GRID

Radiointerferometry applied to the study of Active Galactic Nuclei

Goal: Study of the parsec-scale radio jets of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN), making use of the Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI).

The project permit to obtain statistical conclusions about the physics of AGN, combining:

Multi-epoch multy-frequency VLBI observations. Numerical magnetohydrodynamical relativistics jets models which will

characterize the espectral radioemision. Actually, the numerical codes runs in 24 IBM p32-way "Regatta" compute

nodes, equipped with 1.3 GHz Power 4 processors, with a peak perf. of 166 GFlop/s and 64 GB of main memory per node.

Astrophysical projects with interest in GRID

Remote sensing of atmospheric temperature and composition with Envisat

Goal: Improve significantly the knowledge of the temperature and composition in the stratosphere by analyzing the measurements to be obtain with instruments MIPAS (ESA satellite Envisat) and SABER (NASA mission Timed).

The project will analyse atmospheric pressure/temperature and minor constituents abundances, including non-LTE processes.

The hardware requirements in order to apply Non-LTE inversion technique to

work with the high spectral resolution MIPAS measurements are 16 processors and 16 Gbyte shared RAM (min).

Astrophysical projects with interest in GRID

Spanish participation in the mission COROT (Convection, Rotation and planetary Transits)

Goal: COROT is a space telescope dedicated to estelar photometry with extremely high precision. The mission has two main objectives:

Asteroseismology: COROT will perform observations of large durations on stars to characterize their oscillations,with continuous observations lasting 5 months,with a precision in the order of one part in 1000000.

Detection of extrasolar planets: As COROT aims both a high precision and a long observation time, the search for terrestrial exoplanets by the transit method can easily be integrated in the payload and in the mission profile.

The mission will generate a large amount of data. The analysis will need a lot of CPU time in order to find oscillation modes and variations in the

brightness of the star between 0.01% and 1%.

Astrophysical projects with interest in GRID

Statistical study of the Interestellar Medium (ISM) and Star Formation of a complete sample of 760 isolated galaxies

Goal: Quantify the ISM properties of a well defined and statistically significant sample of isolated galaxies in order to characterize a reference sample with minimum influence from the environment.

The sample will have a complete multiwavelength information concerning the ISM, and it will be of special interest to analyse the large amount of data will be generated for high z galaxies.

The data will become public by means of a database. It’ll be integrated in a future Virtual Global Observatory.