A European VO Initiative

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• A European VO Initiative

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Overview

• The Need for Change
• New Scientific Opportunities Capabilities
• AVO Status
• The VO Roadmap and Challenges

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Computation Communication

• Three parameter universe
• Resources on the desktop
• Connection to the desktop
• Data volume needs of the desktop
• The relative growth and amplitude of these
  parameters is causing a paradigm shift in IT
  GRID
• ASTRONOMERS need the GRID

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Compute Power

• Moores Law
• T218 mths
• Strategy to exceed this parallelism
• Implies bigger,distributed, shared systems
• SETI 14.2 TFLOPs

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Web content
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Science Data Volume
ESO/STECF Science Archive Facility
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Network Bandwidth

• Nielsens Law T2 20 months

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Volume and Bandwidth Strategies

• Distributed Storage Devices
• Implies
• Parallel access - parallel storage
• Fragmented data
• Databases
• Information Hierarchies
• Implies
• Content specific (configurable) downloads - just
  what you need and no more

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Movement in the Market
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New Science

• Mining Large Data Sets
• Statistical Significance
• Rare Events
• The Unexpected

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New Science

• Joining Large Data Sets
• Why?
• Unbiased census of the sky at all l
• Finding new examples of known objects
• Finding examples of new object types
• Probing the time domain -
• What has moved?
• What is new?
• Build me a light curve for objects of type X
• How?
• Connectability, Interoperability, Standards

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The AVO Proposal

• EU RTD Proposal submitted 15 February 2001
  following OPTICON recommendations for a European
  VO effort (similar effort in the US NVO
  proposed by Decadal Report)
• ESO PI (Quinn) STECF(Benvenuti), CDS (Genova),
  TERAPIX (Mellier), ASTROGRID (Lawrence) and
  Jodrell Bank (Diamond) NVO affiliates
• Asked for funds for a three year Phase-A study of
  an Astrophysical Virtual Observatory 7.2
  Million (50 from EU and 50 from
  organizations)
• ASTRO-WISE Proposal (Kuijken PI) for processing
  OmegaCam data is complementary - an AVO content
  builder

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AVO Work Program

• Work Areas
• Science Use Cases and Requirements based on
  ASTROVIRTEL
• Interoperability deployment and demonstration
• Technology needs
• GRID systems
• Scalable storage and computation
• Databases

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AVO Status

• AVO approved with EU funds 2 Million (total
  budget 4 M )
• Contract signature in October and funding start
  in November 2001
• 9 NEW POSITIONS for 3 years over 6 institutions
• Total VO funding to date AVONVOASTROGRID 21
  million (US)

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VO Challenges

• AVO the promise
• Bob Fosbury JENAM 2001
• (1) To take the data collected by teams for
  speci?c projects and manage/massage it in such a
  way as to be of general use
• Comments -
• If the data in an archive are neither
  well-calibrated nor well-described, they are of
  little value for the AVO
• If the data are in good order, the AVO is
  unnecessary it is just a layer of middle-men
• If I were a funding agency, why should I support
  the middle-man when I could fund the original
  science project?

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VO Promises

• To develop tools to allow the extraction of data
  products which are easy to use and even to do the
  processing in advance
• Comments
• If the development of a tool is not driven
  directly and speci?cally by the science project,
  it will probably not do the right thing
• at least, you will not know whether it has done
  the right thing

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VO Promises

• (3) To create a hardware/software/network
  infrastructure to enable large projects
• Comments
• Should astronomy do this?
• Remember
• .. our subject has a limited intellectual
  resource
• The Golgafrinchans would probably classify AVO
  operatives in the same category as telephone
  sanitisers, hairdressers and advertising
  account executives and send them in Arc Fleet
  C

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A VO Roadmap

• To address Bobs comments the international VO
  effort needs to define a unified and
  astronomically accepted roadmap for the next
  three years
• Without a publicly visible direction,
  accountability and receptiveness to requirements
  we will fail -
• This roadmap must be in defined/produced by the
  next international VO meeting

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Building the Roadmap

• Three important milestones
• Definition of the VO science mission and scope -
  what will the VO do for data quality?
• Early definition and delivery of new,
  astronomical useful tools
• International astronomical agreement on
  interoperability standards - as important to
  astronomy as FITS

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Planning

• AVO Executive Meetings and NVO joint discussions
  in Feb, May and October 2001
• A,N,GA,,VO presentations at SPIE, JENAM and
  ADASS
• Major international meeting in Garching on VOs
  (ESO, ESA, NASA, NSF) planned for June 10-14 2002
• Define the International VO Community

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AVO Web Pages

• http//www.eso.org/projects/avo
• AVAILABLE NOW