Investigating interoperability of the LSST data management software stack with Astropy

Abstract

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope will be an 8.4m optical survey telescope sited in Chile and capable of imaging the entire sky twice a week. The data rate of approximately 15 TB per night and the requirements to both issue alerts on transient sources within 60 seconds of observing and also to create annual data releases means that automated data management systems and data processing pipelines are a key deliverable of the LSST construction project. The LSST data management software has been in development since 2004 and, like other software developed in that era such as CASA, is based on a C++ core with a Python control layer. The software consists of nearly quarter of a million lines of code covering the system from fundamental WCS and table libraries to pipeline environments and distributed process execution. The Astropy project began in 2011 as an attempt to bring together disparate open source Python projects and build a core standard infrastructure that can be used by and built upon by the astronomy community. This project has been phenomenally successful in the years since it has begun and has grown to be the de facto standard for Python software in astronomy. Astropy brings with it considerable expectations from the community on how astronomy Python software should be developed and it is clear that by the time LSST is fully operational in the 2020s many of the prospective users of the LSST software stack will assume that Astropy software will be integrated. In this paper we will describe the overlap between the LSST science pipeline software and Astropy software and investigate areas where the LSST software provides new functionality. We will also discuss the possibilities of re-engineering the LSST science pipeline software to build upon Astropy, including the option of contributing a liated packages.

Keywords

Affiliated Institutions

• University of Washington US
• Space Telescope Science Institute US
• California Institute of Technology US
• SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory US
• Large Synoptic Survey Telescope Corporation US
• Princeton University US

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