Search NASA⌕ Search
Home/Archive/DOE OSTI

DOE OSTI · 1802358

Kira: Processing Astronomy Imagery Using Big Data Technology

Zhang, Zhao·Barbary, Kyle·Nothaft, Frank Austin·Sparks, Evan R.·Zahn, Oliver·Franklin, Michael J.·Patterson, David A.·Perlmutter, Saul
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Scientific analyses commonly compose multiple single-process programs into a dataflow. An end-to-end dataflow of single-process programs is known as a many-task application. Typically, HPC tools are used to parallelize these analyses. In this work, we investigate an alternate approach that uses Apache Spark-a modern platform for data intensive computing-to parallelize many-task applications. We implement Kira, a flexible and distributed astronomy image processing toolkit, and its Source Extractor (Kira SE) application. Using Kira SE as a case study, we examine the programming flexibility, dataflow richness, scheduling capacity and performance of Apache Spark running on the Amazon EC2 cloud. By exploiting data locality, Kira SE achieves a 4.1× speedup over an equivalent C program when analyzing a 1TB dataset using 512 cores on the Amazon EC2 cloud. Furthermore, Kira SE on the Amazon EC2 cloud achieves a 1.8× speedup over the C program on the NERSC Edison supercomputer. A 128-core Amazon EC2 cloud deployment of Kira SE using Spark Streaming can achieve a second-scale latency with a sustained throughput of 800 MB/s. Our experience with Kira demonstrates that data intensive computing platforms like Apache Spark are a performant alternative for many-task scientific applications.

Explore related subjects

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Zhang, Zhao, Barbary, Kyle, Nothaft, Frank Austin, Sparks, Evan R., Zahn, Oliver, Franklin, Michael J., Patterson, David A., Perlmutter, Saul. 2016-08-23. Kira: Processing Astronomy Imagery Using Big Data Technology. https://doi.org/10.1109/tbdata.2016.2599926

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related reports

DOE OSTI2026

TANTE: Time-adaptive operator learning via neural Taylor expansion

Operator learning for time-dependent partial differential equations (PDEs) has seen rapid progress in recent years, enabling efficient approximation of complex spatiotemporal dynamics. However, most existing methods rely on fixed time step sizes during rollout, which limits their ability to adapt to varying temporal complexity and often leads to error accumulation. In this work, we propose the Time-Adaptive Transformer with Neural Taylor Expansion (TANTE), a novel operator-learning framework that produces continuous-time predictions with adaptive step sizes. TANTE predicts future states by performing a Taylor expansion at the current state, where neural networks learn both the higher-order temporal derivatives and the local radius of convergence. This allows the model to dynamically adjust its rollout based on the local behavior of the solution, thereby reducing cumulative error and improving computational efficiency. We demonstrate the effectiveness of TANTE across a wide range of PDE benchmarks, achieving superior accuracy and adaptability compared to fixed-step baselines, delivering accuracy gains of 60-80 % and speed-ups of 30-40 % at inference time.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2026

Structured illumination for surface-resolved grazing-incidence X-ray scattering

Grazing-incidence (GI) scattering techniques are widely used to characterize thin films, offering high surface sensitivity and insight into morphology and structure. However, these approaches typically provide statistical averaged information due to elongated footprint or limited spatial resolution due to beam size. Here we introduce a method that combines structured illumination with GI X-ray scattering and leverages our computational imaging approach to resolve local structural details. We demonstrate that our method captures local features of an organic semiconductor thin film without the need for sample rotation as in tomography. The method expands GI techniques from statistical averaging to high-resolution imaging, thereby providing the capability for detailed analysis of local material properties, such as domain shape, orientation and polymorphism, which are critical for advancing material design towards more efficient and tailored materials.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗