The Institute of High Energy Physics (IFAE) is one of the groups developing and maintaining the web app CosmoHub, a tool designed to distribute and analyze cosmological data from major experiments dedicated to mapping the Universe.
CosmoHub has been developed at the Port d’Informació Científica (PIC), placed at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) Campus, operated by the Institut de Física d’Altes Energies (IFAE) in collaboration with researchers from the Institut de Ciències de l’Espai (ICE-IEEC/CSIC).
Every day more science needs large amounts of data to produce knowledge. This data has to be stored and analyzed in order to extract the information that it contains. In the framework of the Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology, scientific data management of the PIC is now offered to biostatistics, genomics, and chemistry, science areas that, like physics, are entering the Big Data era.
More information about the PIC:
The PIC has more than 6000 processors and more than 20 petabytes of capacity. It is one of the principal nodes for managing data from the LHC, CERN’s hadron collider. PIC is also a data centre for Cosmology experiments. Projects like the Dark Energy Survey (DES), Euclid, Physics of the Accelerating Universe (PAU) and Marenostrum Institut de Ciències de l’Espai Simulations (MICE) are already using CosmoHub to distribute and make queries with their data.
CosmoHub uses a system for managing big data that allows obtaining results very fast without requiring technical knowledge. Thanks to this new system, 4-hour queries are now done in less than a minute.
You can find more information about this project on the CosmoHub website.