From planet Earth, the distance to any other galaxy outside of the Milky Way is massive. When you pull back your perspective to the galaxy level, the Milky Way has several “close” neighbors. Andromeda Galaxy is probably the best-known neighbor to most amateur astronomy enthusiasts – it’s the closest major galaxy to us at only about 2.5 million light-years away. There are also two young dwarf galaxies: the large and small Magellanic Clouds, which are even closer, at about 160,000 light-years and 200,000 light-years away, respectively. These small galaxies are close enough for scientists to utilize resources like the Hubble Space Telescope to study individual stars within them. An international team of researchers from the Space Telescope Science Institute did just that, using ACCESS-allocated resources at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) to make the best use of the data they gathered.

Using a new analytical tool called the Bayesian Extinction and Stellar Tool (BEAST), developed by Karl Gordon and his team at the institute, Claire Murray, an assistant astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute and Johns Hopkins University, and grad student Christina Lindberg were able to use PSC’s Bridges-2 supercomputer to analyze the light spectra of many individual stars at once.

We used the extreme memory nodes on Bridges-2, because … the stellar modeling requires a really big grid of stellar templates … There are seven different dimensions, seven different physical properties that we’re solving for. And so we end up with … a grid that itself is at least two terabytes, and so to load that into memory on our local machines [isn’t possible] … We also have 1.5 million stars for this particular project and so processing all of those required just a lot of turning through CPU hours … Bridges-2 really enabled us to improve the precision of our measurements, and then also the speed with which we could process.

—Claire Murray, Space Telescope Science Institute

ACCESS resources are ideal for space research because the data collected is immense and requires the storage and processing power of HPC resources to analyze it. If you’d like to read more about this research, you can find the original story here: New Tool Details Millions of Stars in Neighboring Galaxies

If your research project could benefit from HPC resources, getting an ACCESS allocation is easy. You can find more information about getting started with ACCESS here.

Resource Provider Institution(s):  Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC)
Resources Used: Bridges-2
Affiliations: Space Telescope Science Institute
Funding Agency: NSF 
Grant or Allocation Number(s): PHY240193

The science story featured here was enabled by the U.S. National Science Foundation’s ACCESS program, which is supported by National Science Foundation grants #2138259, #2138286, #2138307, #2137603, and #2138296.