Application of the Dark Energy Survey Data Management System to the Blanco Cosmology Survey Data

The Dark Energy Survey (DES; operations 2010-2016) will image 5000 deg2 of the southern sky using a new 3 deg2 imager (DECam) for the CTIO Blanco 4-m telescope. The total data volume after the end of the survey will exceed 1 peta-byte, which requires our data management system (DMS) to offer a high degree of automated processing. Our DMS leverages the existing high performance computing infrastructure to meet the project's goals. The DESDMS consists of (1) processing pipelines with built in quality assurance testing, (2) a distributed archive to support automated data processing and calibration, (3) a catalog archive database to support scientific analysis, (4) web portals for control, monitoring, user data access and scientific analysis, and (5) hardware platforms required for operations.

We have tested our early version of DMS using both of the simulated DECam data from Fermilab and the observed data from the Blanco Cosmology Survey (BCS), which is a 45-night NOAO survey program. The aim of BCS is to study the cosmic acceleration using the galaxy cluster survey (in coordination with APEX, ACT and SPT) and the galaxy power spectrum. The BCS employs the MOSAIC-II imager currently installed on the Blanco telescope to carry out the deep, griz photometric survey of two 50 deg2 patches of the southern sky. The flexibility and scalabity of our DMS allows the automatic reduction of the BCS data to be done on local workstations, which is convenient because of the two orders of magnitude lower data volume compared to DES.

We report our preliminary results from reducing the BCS data for the first two observing semesters with our DESDMS. We present survey completeness limits, astrometric and photometric accuracy, photometric redshift estimates and a preliminary summary of optical cluster finding and the galaxy angular power spectrum.