Astronomy in the Cloud: Using MapReduce for Image Co-Addition

In the coming decade, astronomical surveys of the sky will generate tens of terabytes of images and detect hundreds of millions of sources every night. The study of these sources will involve computation challenges such as anomaly detection and classification and moving-object tracking. Since such studies benefit from the highest-quality data, methods such as image co-addition, i.e., astrometric registration followed by per-pixel summation, will be a critical preprocessing step prior to scientific investigation. With a requirement that these images be analyzed on a nightly basis to identify moving sources such as potentially hazardous asteroids or transient objects such as supernovae, these data streams present many computational challenges. Given the quantity of data involved, the computational load of these problems can only be addressed by distributing the workload over a large number of nodes. However, the high data throughput demanded by these applications may present scalability challenges for certain storage architectures. One scalable data-processing method that has emerged in recent years is MapReduce, and in this article we focus on its popular open-source implementation called Hadoop. In the Hadoop framework, the data are partitioned among storage attached directly to worker nodes, and the processing workload is scheduled in parallel on the nodes that contain the required input data. A further motivation for using Hadoop is that it allows us to exploit cloud computing resources: i.e., platforms where Hadoop is offered as a service. We report on our experience of implementing a scalable image-processing pipeline for the SDSS imaging database using Hadoop. This multiterabyte imaging data set provides a good testbed for algorithm development, since its scope and structure approximate future surveys. First, we describe MapReduce and how we adapted image co-addition to the MapReduce framework. Then we describe a number of optimizations to our basic approach and report experimental results comparing their performance.