Abstracts:

Kent Blackburn
High Performance Scientific Computing for LIGO
The LIGO Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) completed its initial science runs in October of 2010. The detectors are currently being upgraded to deliver ten times the sensitivity and a thousand times the event rate. Correspondingly, the computational challenges present for initial LIGO science runs are being ramped up to support the higher data rates, longer in-band signals and increasing complexity of data analysis methods. This presentation will discuss many of the computationally demands placed on LIGO and advanced LIGO necessary for data analysis of gravitational wave data.

Carolyn Brinkworth
Teaching the "unteachable": astronomy, robotics and programming for dropout kids in crisis
Since 2011, IPAC has been working with Learning Works Charter School here in Pasadena - a school expressly designed to serve dropout kids who are deemed to be in crisis, through dropping out or being excluded from public school, becoming involved with the juvenile detention system, or becoming pregnant. I'll describe the work we're doing with the school to engage these "unteachable" kids in science, astronomy and robotics, and the ways in which my team of outstanding and dedicated volunteers is helping the students to fulfill their A-G requirements so that they don't just graduate from high school, but have the opportunity to go onto college.

Sean Carey
Challenges in Data Analysis of Spitzer Exoplanet Observations
Spitzer is NASA's premier mission for the characterization of exoplanets. It's unique capabilities include its ability to obtain long, continuous observations (hours to days); its very stable photometry - demonstrated at 30 ppm (1-sigma); and its wavelength coverage which allows it to sample thermal emission from hot exoplanet atmospheres and constrain important chemical constituents with strong spectral features in the 3-5 micron window. Extracting high-precision photometry from the data is complicated by sources of correlated noise which must be trended from the data. The Spitzer operations team has identified and implemented several low cost, low risk methods of mitigating correlated noise in high-precision staring mode observations. These improvements include the precise mapping of the intra-pixel gain via repeated observations of a standard star on the same portion of a pixel until the photometric noise has been reduced through co-addition. The resulting gain maps will enable reduction of staring mode data without trending photometric variations from the science data themselves.

Rick Ebert
NED Queries with Queuing and Scheduling
It has always been possible to construct and submit queries to NED that take a long time to complete. As NED has grown, so has this problem: With the integration of several large catalogs, it has become possible to submit queries that, with the current data structure and resource constraints, cannot be completed in a typical safe web session time. We will describe the design pattern and current implementation of one of the solutions to query and resource management by NED, the NED Backgrounding with Scheduling and Queuing system.

Steve Groom
Archiving and Serving Data from the WISE/NEOWISE Mission
NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission, and the companion Near-Earth Object WISE (NEOWISE) mission enhancement, mapped the sky at four Infrared wavelengths in 2010 and 2011, producing a number of image and extracted source data products. The latter include data tables ranging in size from a few hundred million rows, to over 40 billion rows in a single table. NASA's Infrared Science Archive (IRSA) is responsible to make these products available to the community through its general catalog search facility. Due to the extreme size of the largest of these products and the limited resources for serving them, and the desire for full relational query support using them, a variety of techniques are being applied in the implementation of these services.

Robert Hurt
AstroPix: The Other IPAC Archive
A decade ago the IAU identified a need in the astronomical outreach community to find a way to improve access to the wealth of public-friendly astronomical imagery released by the world's premiere observatories. IPAC has taken a central role in this multi-mission collaboration to develop appropriate metadata standards to capture the rich descriptive information in outreach imagery, and most recently, to build the AstroPix Archive. Approaching 4000 image assets, it currently holds the key public imagery from NASA's Great Observatories, the ESO archives, and a growing list of other missions (including WISE). Now you can find it all in a one-stop shopping experience that has the power to provide web services to 3rd party websites and applications.

David Imel
Perl Regex Magic: A new general-purpose Name Parser System for IPAC Archives
A query-interface to an archive often must make use of a front-end filter to put the query string into a form recognizable by the database. IPAC has had an elegant, though arguably arcane, system of rules for doing this "Name Parsing". Recently, the needs of the Exoplanet Archive outgrew the flexibility of the current Name Parser. In this presentation I describe a more flexible and maintainable name-parser system based on Perl Regular Expressions. The new system not only supports Exoplanet Archive operations, but has been used to assist in validating rule changes for the NASA Extragalactic Database.

Jamie Kinney
Scientific Computing with Amazon Web Services
Cloud Computing is increasingly playing an integral role in scientific research. This session will provide an introduction to Amazon Web Services, describing in more detail, throes services which are most relevant to the research community. Following this introduction, we will examine several examples from NASA, CERN, KEK, NIH and other research institutions with a goal of better understanding how AWS can support global "Big Science" projects, education and public outreach and collaborative research environments.

Following the presentation, we will hold a hands-on training session in which participants will create an AWS account and learn how to provision storage and compute resources in the cloud.

Davy Kirkpatrick
Tools and Tricks for Finding Nearby Stars in Astronomical Data Sets
The all-sky proper motion surveys performed by Willem Luyten took overy sixty years to complete. Modern proper motion surveys can be accomplished in far less time. This talk will address the new AllWISE Motion Survey for nearby stars that took only a few months to complete, and will specifically focus on the software that has enabled this acceleration. Future improvements to the software, which can provide additional speed-up as well as more complete results, will also be discussed.

Joe Lazio
The Virtual Astronomical Observatory: Status Update
Astronomy is being transformed by the vast quantities of data, models, and simulations that are becoming available to astronomers at an ever-accelerating rate. The U.S. Virtual Astronomical Observatory (VAO) has been funded to provide an operational facility that is intended to be a resource for discovery and access of data, and to provide science services that use these data. I provide a review of the VAO accomplishments and an update on plans for the future.

Amy Mainzer
NEOWISE: A Time-Domain Survey for Minor Planets
The near-Earth object hunting portion of the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer mission, known as NEOWISE, has resulted in the detection of 158,000 minor planets at thermal infrared wavelengths, including more than 34,000 new discoveries. The sample collected by NEOWISE has enabled a wide range of science investigations, including setting limits on the numbers, orbit distribution, sizes, and albedos of near-Earth objects (NEOs). The infrared-selected sample was derived using the WISE Moving Object Processing System (WMOPS), which allows moving objects such as asteroids and comets to be sifted out from stars, galaxies, and artifacts. The NEOWISE mission has recently been selected for restart, paving the way for a new series of time-domain scientific inquiries.

Frank Masci
Test-driving IPAC's First Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessor: a new era in parallel computing"
Intel's new Xeon Phi coprocessors are capable of delivering better compute performance over regular Xeon processors for certain types of parallelized applications. I will describe the porting, optimization, and benchmarking of astronomical image processing software and how IPAC may benefit from this new technology in future.

Luisa Rebull
NITARP: Not Dead Yet!
Bloodied but not dead yet, NITARP soldiers on. By the time of the GRITS, we are likely to have selected a 2014 class that is less than half the size of the 2013 class, but at least we are still here. I'll review the impact of NITARP from 2005-2013, according to a survey we conducted in Spring 2013. We redesigned our website this spring as well: http://nitarp.ipac.caltech.edu/

Ben Rusholme
Splitting serial work over multiple processors
On using the python's built-in multiprocessing to split serial tasks over distributed multiple-core computers (and stay sane).

David Shupe
The SIMPLE application of Python to handle large Herschel datasets easily
Processing far-infrared data from Herschel has required users to invest much time and effort learning an unfamiliar, graphics-intensive environment that often needs computer memory far outstripping what's available in a typical desktop. To make mapmaking more accessible to the wider astronomical community, we have developed the Simplified Interface Making PACS Look Easy (SIMPLE) using the communication capabilities and astronomy-specific features that are now readily available in Python. SIMPLE interviews the user for key scientific parameters, then seamlessly processes the data on a remote large-memory compute server, all the way to maps and extracted photometry tables. I will describe the design patterns and Python features that have allowed us to quickly assemble this application.

Lisa Storrie-Lombardi
Technical Challenges in Extending your Extended Mission
The Spitzer Space Telescope has just completed the fourth year of its extended warm mission after a 5.5 year primary cryogenic mission. The current engineering assessment is that the observatory can continue science operations into at least 2017 and likely beyond. The technical issues that arise because your observatory continues to operate well after its originally planned shelf life are great challenges to face. For Spitzer they primarily arise from the unique earth-trailing orbit that takes the observatory further from earth every year. Uplink, downlink, and safe mode communications are impacted in multiple ways. More recent challenges have resulted from software running for several years without a restart. I'll review some of the technical challenges faced by Spitzer and how the project has successfully handled each one.