Camera | Telescope & Site | Data Management

Data Products | Facilities | Pipelines | Historical Documents

The data management system begins at the data acquisition interface between the camera and telescope subsystems and flows through to the data products accessed by end users. On the way, it moves through three types of managed facilities supporting data management, as well as end user sites that may conduct science using LSST data or pipeline resources on their own computing infrastructure.

There will be a Mountain Summit/Base Facility, as well as a central Archive Center, multiple Data Access Centers, and a System Operations Center. The data will be transported over existing high-speed optical fiber links from mountain summit/base facility in South America to the archive center in the U.S. Data will also flow from the mountain summit/base facility and the archive center to the data access centers over existing fiber optic links.

The Mountain Summit/Base Facility is composed of the mountaintop telescope site, where data acquisition must interface to the other LSST subsystems, and the Base Facility, where rapid-turnaround processing will occur for data quality assessment and near real-time alerts.

The Archive Center is a super-computing class data center with high reliability and availability. This is where the data will undergo complete processing and re-processing and permanent storage. It is also the main repository feeding the distribution of LSST data to the community.

Data Access Centers for broad user access are envisioned, according to a tiered access model where the tiers define the capacity and response available. There are two project funded Data Access Centers co-located with the Base Facility and the Archive Center. These centers provide replication of all of the LSST data to ensure disaster recovery is possible. They provide Virtual Observatory interfaces to the LSST data products. LSST is encouraging non-US/non-Chilean funding and partners to host additional Data Access Centers to increase end user access bandwidth and help amortize observatory operations costs.

The System Operations Center (SOC) provides a control room and large-screen display for supervisory monitoring and control of the DM System. Network and facility status are available as well as the capability to "drill down" to individual facilities. DM support to observatory science operations and an end user help desk are also at the SOC.