Astronomical data organization, management and access in Scientific Data Lakes

TL;DR

This paper discusses the development of a Scientific Data Lake prototype for astronomical data, leveraging distributed data management tools inspired by particle physics to improve data organization, access, and FAIR compliance.

Contribution

It introduces a novel Scientific Data Lake prototype tailored for astronomy, adapting tools from the LHC computing grid to address domain-specific data management challenges.

Findings

Prototype demonstrates effective handling of astronomical data use cases.

Integration of distributed storage and authentication improves data accessibility.

Aligns astronomical data management with FAIR and Open Data standards.

Abstract

The data volumes stored in telescope archives is constantly increasing due to the development and improvements in the instrumentation. Often the archives need to be stored over a distributed storage architecture, provided by independent compute centres. Such a distributed data archive requires overarching data management orchestration. Such orchestration comprises of tools which handle data storage and cataloguing, and steering transfers integrating different storage systems and protocols, while being aware of data policies and locality. In addition, it needs a common Authorisation and Authentication Infrastructure (AAI) layer which is perceived as a single entity by end users and provides transparent data access. The scientific domain of particle physics also uses complex and distributed data management systems. The experiments at the Large Hadron Collider\,(LHC) accelerator at CERN generate several hundred petabytes of data per year. This data is globally distributed to partner sites and users using national compute facilities. Several innovative tools were developed to successfully address the distributed computing challenges in the context of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG). The work being carried out in the ESCAPE project and in the Data Infrastructure for Open Science (DIOS) work package is to prototype a Scientific Data Lake using the tools developed in the context of the WLCG, harnessing different physics scientific disciplines addressing FAIR standards and Open Data. We present how the Scientific Data Lake prototype is applied to address astronomical data use cases. We introduce the software stack and also discuss some of the differences between the domains.