The Dark Energy Survey Data Processing and Calibration System

Understand

The Dark Energy Survey (DES) is a 5000 deg2 grizY survey reaching characteristic photometric depths of 24th magnitude (10 sigma) and enabling accurate photometry and morphology of objects ten times fainter than in SDSS.

• Preparations for DES have included building a dedicated 3 deg2 CCD camera (DECam), upgrading the existing CTIO Blanco 4m telescope and developing a new high performance computing (HPC) enabled data management system (DESDM).
• The DESDM system will be used for processing, calibrating and serving the DES data.
• The total data volumes are high (~2PB), and so considerable effort has gone into designing an automated processing and quality control system.