General information
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Hosting OrganisationCentro de Estudios de Física del Cosmos de Aragón
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AddressPlaza San Juan, 1, Planta 2, 44001 Teruel
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Contact Info:
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Phone
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Emailcefca@cefca.es
Description
The Centro de Estudios de Física del Cosmos de Aragón (CEFCA) is a foundation of public interest of the Government of Aragón that was created in 2008 (i) to define and construct the Observatorio Astrofísico de Javalambre (OAJ), (ii) to implement the data center “Unidad de Procesado y Archivo de Datos” (UPAD), with capacity to provide raw, reduced and calibrated data to the whole scientific community, and (iii) to carry out and promote the scientific exploitation of the data produced by OAJ and UPAD. The main scientific topics of CEFCA focus on Galaxy Formation and Evolution and Cosmology.
Summary of Research Services
Access to OAJ telescopes and instrumentation. Access to raw, reduced and calibrated sky images and scientific databases to the astronomical community and general public. CEFCA has signed several collaboration agreements with national and international research institutions and consortia. External data storage service is under development.
Technology Capabilities
CEFCA has expertise in several areas of technological development for astronomical telescopes and instrumentation: 1) Control (hardware and software), mechanics, electronics and optics; 2) Project management; 3) Assembly, integration and verification of ground-based instrumentation; 4) Software development, astronomical data processing and archiving, VO standards and services, user-friendly tools.
Main equipment or Facilities
- The Observatorio Astrofísico de Javalambre (OAJ), managed and operated by CEFCA.
- Unit for Processing and Data Archiving (UPAD): this data center has been designed to process and archive all the images collected by the OAJ telescopes. With capacity for 5.1 PB of storage and a total of more than 20 nodes with more that 500 cores, the UPAD provides the hardware infrastructure needed to provide raw, reduced and calibrated data on a quasi-real time basis and keep data backup.
- External Data Access Machine (EDAM): this is a system with 2 web servers (16 cores, 128 GB RAM, 28 TB storage, each server) and 2 database servers (12 cores, 256 GB RAM, 16TB storage, each server), to allow efficient access to the scientific database and sky images for the astronomical community and the general public.
- Scientific High Performance Computing system: this is a computing cluster made of 20 nodes summing up to 540 cores and more than 200 TB of storage, available for scientific analysis carried out by researches at CEFCA.
- GALÁCTICA: this is a visitor center for the outreach and promotion of Astrophysics, conceived to host and operate up to nine telescopes and their domes. Three of them (of 80cm, 40cm and a solar telescope of 15cm with professional instrumentation) will be devoted to activities for the general public, schools, universities, amateur astronomy and research centers. The other six domes will be used for the hosting of external telescopes.