CfA OIR Division Lunch Talks
Friday, November 19, 2010, Noon, Phillips Auditorium

ADASS XX:
Processing and Analyzing Petabytes of Information
Douglas Mink (CfA)

The twentieth annual conference on Data Analysis Software and Systems was held in Boston from November 7-11, 2010. The key topics defined by the program organizing committee, into which the oral presentations were categorized, were:
  • Education and Public Outreach
  • Scientific Computing
  • Large Observatory Challenges
  • Cross Catalog Matching
  • Solar Astronomy
  • Grid and Grid Virtualization

The 128 posters, which are a good indicator of what the astronomical software community is actually working on, fell into the following categories, which I tried to limit to less than 25 posters each:

  • Ground-based instrument pipelines
  • Space-based instrument pipelines
  • Archives
  • Virtual Observatory
  • Software tools
  • Data Analysis
  • Data visualization

The primary message I got from the meeting was that lots of data is being generated already (petabytes per year now and more in the future). I'll discuss the ways people are processing that deluge into usable formats and developing tools to analyze it.