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2005 News Stories

• GADU/GNARE Uses TeraGrid For Protein Sequence Analysis
• TeraGyroid: Gyroids on the TeraGrid
• TeraShake: Simulating a Big Shake in Southern California Basins
• Seismic Modeling and Oil Reservoir Simulations with TeraGrid
• Improving Groundwater Cleanup Decision-Making with TeraGrid
• Harnessing TeraGrid to the Sky: Understanding Dark Energy
• AMANDA and TeraGrid: Exploring the Violent Universe
• TeraGrid Science Gateways: NanoHUB
• Identifying Brain Disorders with TeraGrid

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AMANDA and TeraGrid: Exploring the Violent Universe

Scientists are using a new kind of "telescope" to see the universe through the window of high-energy neutrinos, helping unravel longstanding mysteries about the origin of the highest energy cosmic rays. Unlike normal telescopes, which gather light from above, AMANDA, the Antarctic Muon and Neutrino Detector Array, extends downward more than a mile into the clear, low-noise ice at the South Pole. Neutrinos from distant parts of the universe occasionally trigger cascades of light-emitting particles as they travel through the Earth, entering in the Northern Hemisphere and reaching to the the South Pole. AMANDA's sensitive light detectors can tease out this faint indirect evidence of these elusive neutrinos, but to do so requires analyzing a growing flood of data — already 15 terabytes per year — equivalent to about one and a half times the printed collection of the Library of Congress.

For the task of analyzing all of this data, physics graduate student Andrea Silvestri and Professor Steve Barwick of the University of California, Irvine and the AMANDA experiment have turned to the large-scale data and computing capabilities of the TeraGrid. The first step was to transfer the massive amount of raw data over a high-speed network from the AMANDA project at UCI into the TeraGrid Storage Resource Broker (SRB) data archive at SDSC. The data capabilities of the TeraGrid allow the researchers to transparently and quickly access this massive data archive from any TeraGrid site.

The data contains about two billion background events from which the task (using sophisticated algorithms) is to distinguish the faint signal of rare, distant-origin neutrinos from the abundant noise of false signals. Since AMANDA gathers data in a probabilistic form, an important part of the analysis involves generating massive simulated data sets, in comparable numbers to the experimental events, using the statistical Monte Carlo method. This process — used to verify the detector and refine the analysis — is very compute-intensive, requiring thousands of hours on TeraGrid resources. For this computational task, the researchers used the Itanium cluster at SDSC, which from the massive data winnowed a final sample of about 1000 neutrinos. In the future, the researchers will use the TeraGrid to link the SDSC Itanium cluster with the Itanium cluster at NCSA. The research will also be extended to the NSF IceCube project, a much larger (one kilometer cubed) telescope array that will produce 10 times the data of AMANDA, 150 terabytes annually.

Figure 1: Sky map from AMANDA neutrino telescope shows that the locally produced atmospheric neutrino background detected to date is quite uniform, without strong sources. Scale on right reflects excess or deficit from mean background events. Image credit: A. Silvestri, AMANDA, UCI.

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