KD-tree and HEALPix-based distributed cone search indexing system for multi-band astronomical catalogs

Abstract

An increasing number of telescopes are being built to provide multi-band data of celestial objects, which is indispensable to astronomical research. The amount of collected observation data, however, have put tremendous pressure on computing systems. Moreover, with the development of the observation equipment, the number of astronomical catalogs that telescopes generated per day keeps increasing rapidly. In this paper, we propose a distributed cone search indexing system (DCSIS) for Multi-Band Astronomical Catalogs among multi-band astronomical catalogs to solve this problem. Major contributions of DCSIS include defining new meta file format for astronomical catalogs, achieving scalability and parallelism for cone search, and the ability to flexibly add data to index system. Evaluations are performed on the Tianhe-1A supercomputer to showcase DCSIS’ scalability for large scale deployment, the results of which show that DCSIS reduce the response time of Multi-band cone search into a tolerant range.