The NOAO Mosaic Pipeline Architecture

The NOAO Mosaic Pipeline is a fully distributed and parallel system able to efficiently process and reduce mosaic imaging data in near real time. Basic CCD reduction, removal of instrumental features (e.g. fringes, pupil ghosts and crosstalk), astrometric calibration and zero point photometric calibration are performed. The NOAOMosaic Pipeline System is composed of a variable number of processing nodes organized in a network. Data can enter the processing network at any node, thus improving the robustness of the whole architecture. While being developed with the NOAO Mosaic Imagers in mind, the system is general enough that it could be easily customized to handle other instruments.