PROJECT TITLE :

Big Bang, Big Data, Big Iron: Fifteen Years of Cosmic Microwave Background Data Analysis at NERSC

ABSTRACT:

The cosmic microwave background (CMB) consists of photons created in the big Bang and cooled by the following expansion of the universe to an virtually perfectly uniform 3-Kelvin sky signal nowadays. These photons experience the complete history of the universe, and every epoch has left its imprint as tiny fluctuations in their temperature and polarization. Decoding these provides unique insight into the history of the universe, constraining the fundamental parameters of both cosmology and high-energy physics. The faintness of these fluctuations needs us "researchers" to collect huge datasets and analyze them on supercomputers. For 15 years, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) has provided the resources for the CMB community's most computationally difficult analyses. In this article, the authors describe how their analysis algorithms and implementations have evolved over now, driven by both the expansion in CMB knowledge volumes and therefore the changes in high-performance computing architectures.