Title:  

Computing the Cosmos: Cosmic Microwave Background Data Analysis For The Planck Mission



Julian Borrill
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory &
Space Sciences Lab, UC Berkeley




Abstract:

The Cosmic Microwave Background radiation provides the earliest
possible image of the Universe, as it was some 400,000 years after
the Big Bang. The statistical properties of the tiny fluctuations in
its temperature and polarization provide a powerful probe of the
early Universe, in principle allowing us to determine the fundamental
parameters of cosmology to exquisite precision. In practice however
extracting this information from raw CMB data is a significant
computational problem that is only getting harder as datasets grow in
size. In this talk I will look ahead to the challenges posed by
Planck satellite mission - expected to generate 500 billion
observations over 600 million sky-pixels - and show some recent
milestone results obtained using 6000 processors of NERSC's Seaborg
supercomputer.