Bailey to Explore DESI Collab for NERSC@50

Space is vast, and mapping it produces vast amounts of data. That’s why the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), a project creating the world’s largest 3D map of the universe, requires deep integration with the kind of supercomputing power found at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC). On Monday, September 30 at 1:30 p.m. PDT, Berkeley Lab Senior Software Developer Stephen Bailey will illuminate this exciting collaboration and how it’s changing the role of HPC in experimental science research; tune in on Zoom for his talk “Making a 3D Map of the Universe at NERSC with DESI.”

DESI is in the process of observing tens of millions of galaxies, quasars, and stars over the course of a five-year survey. The project uses NERSC as its primary data processing and analysis center, including real-time processing as data arrive from the telescope, yearly reprocessing for cosmology analyses, and support for individual science analyses ranging from single-core Jupyter notebooks to massively parallel analysis jobs. This talk will describe the DESI science program, how NERSC has enabled that work through its full ecosystem of services, and how NERSC and DESI have worked together to push the boundaries of what is possible for data-centric work at an HPC center.

Stephen Bailey is a senior software developer in the Physics Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He has over three decades of data management experience, starting with writing a matchmaking app for his high school. Along the way, he earned a BS in Physics from the University of Washington and a PhD in Physics from Harvard University. He currently leads the Data Management team for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, where he uses NERSC to process raw data into useful data to study cosmology.