CDC-FI

Cosmology Data Center Finland

Cosmology Data Center Finland (CDC-FI) facilitates Finland’s participation in large international observational cosmology projects, such as the European Space Agency’s Euclid and LISA, by providing in-kind contributions to these missions.

Euclid is a wide-field space telescope that will map the distribution of galaxies and dark matter. LISA will be the first gravitational wave observatory in space. Euclid and LISA will produce enormous amounts of data that need to be curated. Furthermore, the analysis of the data is complex, and will require substantial computational effort.

Finland already provides a data center for Euclid, but as it will soon receive large volumes of data from space, the data center requires enlargement and renewal. The aim of CDC-FI is thus to utilise the existing Euclid data center and to provide a seed for a new open data center that would allow combining data from several cosmology missions.

The data from Euclid will help solve the mystery of the accelerating expansion of the universe. LISA will not only provide a complementary measure of the expansion of the universe but will also look deeper into the early universe than has been possible with optical or radio telescopes. The data from these missions will have a huge impact on cosmology and astrophysics, and will form a basis for future research in these fields. 

The Cosmology Data Center hardware will be situated at the CSC Kajaani data center. CSC will operate the physical hardware and a system that allows creation of virtual machines on which the mission-specific data centers operate. CSC will take care of the procurement of the hardware, installation and testing of the hardware, setting up the fundamental layers of the software environment, deployment of the cloud environment, and tweaking of the set-up. Together with Aalto University, CSC will help to optimize the system administration of the Euclid and LISA parts within the data center.

This project has received funding from the Research Council of Finland​​​​​​​ under funding decisions No 358628 and 367693.