Sunfall: NERSC Analytics for Astrophysics Users
September 27, 2007
Sunfall is a production analytics system that accelerates science discovery by utilizing novel interactive visualization and analysis techniques to facilitate insight into complex, noisy, high-dimensional, high-volume, time-critical scientific data. NERSC Analytics staff led a multi-disciplinary team of computer scientists and physicists who designed and implemented Sunfall for the Nearby Supernova Factory, an international astrophysics experiment which is the largest data volume supernova search currently in operation. The Sunfall system combines novel image processing algorithms, statistical analysis, and machine learning with highly interactive visual interfaces to enable collaborative, user-driven scientific exploration of supernova image and spectral data. Now in operation at the Nearby Supernova Factory, Sunfall is the first visual analytics system in production use at a major astrophysics project. Project scientists estimate that Sunfall has reduced the data collection, processing, and management effort from 6 FTE to .75 FTE overall, freeing scientists to focus on science discovery. Additionally, by making previously unworkable scientific tasks possible, Sunfall has enabled scientists to attain new insights into their scientific data.
About NERSC and Berkeley Lab
The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) is the primary high-performance computing facility for scientific research sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science. Located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the NERSC Center serves more than 4,000 scientists at national laboratories and universities researching a wide range of problems in combustion, climate modeling, fusion energy, materials science, physics, chemistry, computational biology, and other disciplines. Berkeley Lab is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory located in Berkeley, California. It conducts unclassified scientific research and is managed by the University of California for the U.S. DOE Office of Science. For more information about computing sciences at Berkeley Lab, please visit www.lbl.gov/cs.
