The dark energy survey data management system as a data intensive science gateway

The Dark Energy Survey (DES) collaboration is a multi-national science effort to understand cosmic acceleration and the nature of 'dark energy' responsible for this phenomenon. Dark Energy Survey Data Management (DESDM) system is a new observational astronomy processing pipeline and data management system that will be used to: process raw images obtained from a survey with the new DES field camera (DECam) covering 5000 sq degree of southern sky; archive intermediate and final co-added images; extract catalogs of celestial objects from every image and deliver data products to the astronomy community through portals and services. DESDM has been designed as a data intensive Science Gateway coupling use of shared computational resources (e.g. Teragrid) with project-owned databases and file systems for storage distributed across three continents. DESDM system over the next six years time will perform over 10 million CPU-hours (SUs) of image processing and serve over 4 Petabytes of images and 14 billion cataloged objects to the international DES collaboration. When delivered for operations in 2011, it will be one of, if not the, most scalable and powerful systems for processing telescope images, creating co-added deep images, and generating detailed star and galaxy catalogs in existence. The project's software components consist of a processing framework, an ensemble of astronomy codes, an integrated archive, a data-access framework and a portal infrastructure. This paper provides an overview of the DESDM scope and highlights, the architectural features developed and planned to be able to support Gateway-style management peta-scale intensive continuous processing and on-demand user queries for analysis.