South Pole Telescope¶

SPT-3G, the third generation camera on the South Pole Telescope (SPT), was deployed in the 2016-2017 Austral summer season. The SPT is a 10-meter telescope located at the geographic South Pole and designed for observations in the millimeter-wave and submillimeter-wave regions of the electromagnetic spectrum. The SPT is primarily used to study the cosmic microwave background (CMB).

Requirements¶

The upgraded camera produces an order of magnitude more data than the previous generations of SPT cameras. The telescope is expected to collect a petabyte (PB) of data over course of five years, which is a significantly larger data volume than any other CMB telescope in operation. The increase in data rate required radical changes to the SPT computing model both at the South Pole and University of Chicago. This paper will describe the overall integration of distributed storage and compute resources into a common interface, deployment of on-site data reduction and storage infrastructure, and the usage of the Open Science Grid (OSG) by the SPT collaboration.

Data requirements:

~ 150-200 TB of compressed raw data coming north every year in big boxes of hard drives
~30 TB/year of reduced-rate data arriving continuously by satellite.

Computing Requirements:

~ 150 cores with 4 GB
~ 10M core hours

Resources¶

SPT has two dedicated login nodes. These are used for user analysis and job submission to OSG. To facilitate user analysis, there are Jupyterhub instances running on each of the login nodes.

In addition to the login nodes, there are two dedicated production resources: spt-buffer and spt-mgmt. spt-buffer is dedicated virtual machine that is required to retrieve the data via satellite from pole. United States Antarctic Program (USAP)

NERSC Backups¶

There is automated