Sky Surveys
U-M has made a strong commitment to the future of astronomy by investing in preferred access to major sky surveys like the Dark Energy Survey and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope; individual faculty members also work with Pan-STARRS. Through their involvement in building the surveys, faculty have unique insight in how to make best use of the data.
High-Performance Computing
"
Being involved in the new large surveys…and students’ privileged access to resources like Magellan — that’s what’s helping our students push the boundaries of science."
— Prof. Chris Miller
The department’s instrumentation, data-mining, modeling, and image-analysis projects place high demands on computing resources. That’s why we access the University’s new cloud environment, where the infrastructure is continuously updated to stay ahead of demand — even from the data-intensive sky surveys. In addition, our faculty take advantage of the high-performance computing infrastructure available through NSF and other national and international organizations.
Key Features
- The new Flux high-performance computing facility
- Direct connection to the NSF's Teragrid/XSEDE open scientific-discovery infrastructure with petaflop computing capabilities
- Campus-wide Value Storage with multi-terabyte data volumes
- Internal bandwidth within the Flux environment up to 25 Gbps (25x faster than Ethernet)
- External connectivity to the National LambdaRail backbone at 10 Gbps
