Tucson, AZ and Coquimbo Region, Chile. - Rubin Observatory has finalized a three-year agreement to host its Interim Data Facility (IDF) on Google Cloud. The Rubin IDF will process astronomical data collected by Rubin Observatory in its commissioning phase, and make it available to the Rubin science community in advance of Rubin Observatory’s ten-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). The IDF will allow the Rubin Operations team to become operations-ready and the Rubin science community to be survey-ready when LSST begins in 2023.
The construction of Rubin Observatory is nearing completion, and the Rubin team is now focused on installing and testing various systems to ensure that the science goals of the project will be achieved. The Google Cloud-hosted IDF will initially be used by the Operations team to learn the systems and processes developed by the Rubin Data Management team during construction. Then, beginning in mid 2021, the Rubin Operations team will serve a series of data preview scenarios to the Rubin science community in a modern analysis and tool environment with the IDF.
The robust, stable, and flexible infrastructure provided by the Google Cloud-hosted IDF offers a range of benefits for Rubin during the ramp-up to full science operations. Rubin Data Production team members, about 20 of whom will begin using the IDF right away, can easily deploy systems and access databases on the Cloud, using only the amount of infrastructure they need. The Google Cloud IDF is also scalable in response to usage, which will be critical when members of the Rubin Science Community begin accessing the IDF in late 2021.
Links
[1] https://gallery.lsst.org/bp/#/folder/2358063/117074294