The Dark Energy Survey Data Processing and Calibration System
Joseph J. Mohr, Robert Armstrong, Emmanuel Bertin, Gregory E. Daues,, Shantanu Desai, Michelle Gower, Robert Gruendl, William Hanlon, Nikolay, Kuropatkin, Huan Lin, John Marriner, Don Petravick, Ignacio Sevilla, Molly, Swanson, Todd Tomashek, Douglas Tucker, and Brian Yanny

TL;DR
The paper describes the development and deployment of a comprehensive data processing and calibration system for the Dark Energy Survey, enabling accurate analysis of vast astronomical datasets for cosmological research.
Contribution
It introduces a new high-performance, automated data management system tailored for the DES, including specialized calibration codes and extensions of existing astronomical software.
Findings
Successful deployment on HPC systems in the US and Germany
Extensive testing with simulated and real datasets
Preparation for full science operations in 2012
Abstract
The Dark Energy Survey (DES) is a 5000 deg2 grizY survey reaching characteristic photometric depths of 24th magnitude (10 sigma) and enabling accurate photometry and morphology of objects ten times fainter than in SDSS. Preparations for DES have included building a dedicated 3 deg2 CCD camera (DECam), upgrading the existing CTIO Blanco 4m telescope and developing a new high performance computing (HPC) enabled data management system (DESDM). The DESDM system will be used for processing, calibrating and serving the DES data. The total data volumes are high (~2PB), and so considerable effort has gone into designing an automated processing and quality control system. Special purpose image detrending and photometric calibration codes have been developed to meet the data quality requirements, while survey astrometric calibration, coaddition and cataloging rely on new extensions of the…
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