KDI: Computational Challenges in Cosmology

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Silk9872979 In the past decade cosmology has undergone a renaissance,transforming from a data-starved science to a data-driven one.The COBE satellite and subsequent observations of the CosmicMicrowave Background (CMB) have begun to give us a detailedpicture of the early Universe; telescopes have found galaxies atdistances corresponding to the Universe at one-tenth of itspresent age; large-scale redshift surveys have begun to map outthe structure of the nearby Universe. However, the size of thesedatasets threatens to leave cosmology data-swamped. Realizing ourscientific goals depends on meeting the qualitatively newcomputational challenges set by the quantitatively new data. Theissues cosmologists face in the analysis, synthesis andpresentation of the data --- including data compression andtransmission, mass storage, data mining, parallel algorithms andscaling, inverse problems and regularization methods, and complexdata visualization --- are also at the forefront of currentresearch in Computer Science and Statistics. The investigatorsand their colleagues form a focused collaboration betweenastrophysicists, statisticians and computer scientists to developcomputational tools, techniques and technologies to cope with thenew challenges posed by these datasets. The needs of Cosmologyprovide a practical spur to new developments in Computer Scienceand Statistics, enabling and informing new research both withinastrophysics and more widely in other data-intensive disciplines.Research is organized along four interlocking paths. First, theremust be appropriate tools to analyze the individual datasets.Next are the synthesis and simulation of the datasets toformulate a coherent picture of the evolution of structure in theUniverse. Finally, there must be access to the data and theproducts of the analysis, both to members of the collaborationand to the outside community. Cosmology is the quest for the understanding of the Universeon the largest scales, and of the events that unfolded in thefirst moments after the Big Bang. Light that now makes up theCosmic Microwave Background (or CMB) last interacted with matterin the Universe when it was about one hundred thousand years old(a small fraction of its age today of fifteen billion years);observing the CMB allows cosmologists to map out the Universe atthese very early times. Somewhat closer to home, observing thedistribution of galaxies lets us see the present state of theUniverse. Only ten years ago, the amount of data involved inthese studies was tiny. Advances in telescope and detectortechnology has allowed a manyfold increase in these data; thisvast expansion pushes the limits of our computational ability toanalyze it. The investigators and their colleagues, fromastrophysics, computer science, and statistics, develop tools toanalyze and synthesize this vast amount of data. This allows themto form a coherent and complete picture of the evolution of theUniverse from the earliest times to the present day and ---perhaps most importantly --- far into the future.