Cherenkov Telescope Array
About CTA
The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) will be the world’s leading gamma-ray public observatory. CTA will be used to understand the role of high-energy particles in the most violent phenomena of the Universe and to search for annihilating dark matter particles.
The challenge
CTA is a team of 1350 scientists and engineers from 32 countries and will be a distributed array of more than 100 telescopes built in Spain and the European Space Observatory site in Chile. This collaborative model comes with its challenges: transferring data from telescopes to scientists worldwide, archiving and finding the processing power for data reduction and large-scale Monte Carlo simulations.
EGI-CTA collaboration
CTA is using EGI’s High-Throughput Compute and Online Storage services to handle computational demands during the project’s preparatory phase. The compute and storage services are provided via the CTA Virtual Organisation, one of the most active user groups of EGI. Since 2012 the consortium has used EGI services to guide the choice of the best sites to host CTA telescopes in the North and in the South hemispheres.
CTA EGI usage (2013-2016):
- 360 million HS06 CPU hours
- 11 Petabytes of data transferred
- 2 Petabytes currently in storage
- 11 million computation jobs
Resource providers
CC-IN2P3, CYFRONET-LCG2, DESY-ZN, GRIF, IN2P3-LAPP, INFN-T1
With additional resources provided by the National e-Infrastructures of the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Spain.