Visualization, analysis and storage servers for the aquarius project

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The Aquarius Project is a major computational initiative designed to investigate the clustering of cold dark matter (CDM) on the smallest scales relevant to the formation of galaxies. CDM is believed to be the dominant form of matter in the Universe, and it has become in the past few years the paradigm of structure formation in the Universe. Together with "dark energy" (which governs today the universal expansion on the largest scales) dark matter is one of the premier contemporary puzzles in our understanding of the natural world. An empirical understanding of the way CDM clusters on very small scales---the main goal of Aquarius---would help to constrain the nature of the dark matter and has had major impact on fields as diverse as Galactic Astronomy, Cosmology, and Particle Astrophysics. In particular, Aquarius will greatly advance strategies: (i) for exploring the formation of our Galaxy; (ii) for searching for signals from dark matter annihilation; and (iii) for designing experiments for direct detection of dark matter. These provide important diagnostics and tests that will serve to validate the CDM paradigm. The Aquarius project has used some of the largest academic supercomputers in the world, including STELLA,an IBM-BlueGene supercomputer sited at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, and the HLRB-II Altix supercomputer at the Leibniz Supercomputer Center in Munich, Germany. Through competitive bidding, we were awarded a total of more than 10-million CPU hours at those centers. The simulations have so far produced more than 100Tb of data which are being analyzed by various collaborators across the world. We request a computer system to store, analyze, and visualize parts of the Aquarius dataset at the University of Victoria.