Intermediate Palomar Transient Factory: Realtime Image Subtraction Pipeline

Creators: Cao, Yi; Nugent, Peter E.; Kasliwal, Mansi M.

Abstract

A fast-turnaround pipeline for realtime data reduction plays an essential role in discovering and permitting follow-up observations to young supernovae and fast-evolving transients in modern time-domain surveys. In this paper, we present the realtime image subtraction pipeline in the intermediate Palomar Transient Factory. By using high-performance computing, efficient databases, and machine-learning algorithms, this pipeline manages to reliably deliver transient candidates within 10 minutes of images being taken. Our experience in using high-performance computing resources to process big data in astronomy serves as a trailblazer to dealing with data from large-scale time-domain facilities in the near future.

Additional Information

© 2016 Astronomical Society of the Pacific. Received 2016 June 6; accepted 2016 August 2; published 2016 September 30. We thank J. Sollerman for useful suggestions to improve the manuscript. Y.C. and P.E.N. acknowledge support from the DOE under grant DE-AC02-05CH11231, Analytical Modeling for Extreme-Scale Computing Environments. Y.C. and M.M.K. also acknowledge support by the GROWTH project, funded by the National Science Foundation under grant No. 1545949. The intermediate Palomar Transient Factory project is a scientific collaboration (PI: S. R. Kulkarni) among the California Institute of Technology, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, the Oskar Klein Center, the Weizmann Institute of Science, the TANGO Program of the University System of Taiwan, and the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe.

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