INAF-Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica

INAF-Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica logo

INAF is a governmental research organisation with 19 research centres geographically distributed over the national territory, plus the “Galileo” observing facility located in La Palma, Canary Islands and the “Large Binocular Telescope” observing facility located in Mount Graham, Arizona.

INAF promotes, realizes and coordinates, also within programs of the European Union and international organisms, research activities in many astronomical fields, such as optical/infrared astronomy, radio astronomy, X and γ ray astronomy, particle astrophysics and cosmic physics, in collaboration both with Universities and with other public and private, national and international agencies.

INAF is a major partner of the astrophysics related ESFRI research Infrastructures (CTA, SKA, E-ELT and EST), having actively participated in their definition since the initial phases; it has furthermore important participations in several other world class projects, both ground-based (e.g. ALMA, LBT, MAGIC) and space-borne (e.g. Planck, Gaia, Solar Orbiter, Euclid, Athena).

INAF is also active in the field of e-infrastructures for research, and in particular:

  • computing and data infrastructures for the ESFRI astronomical projects (the H2020 ASTERICS cluster);
  • distributed computing technologies (deployment of infrastructure and integration of domain specific applications, leadership of the A&A Heavy Users Community in the FP7 EGIInspire project, cloud interoperability demonstrator in the H2020 EGI-Engage project),
  • distributed archives of astronomical data (both from ground based and space borne facilities);
  • the astronomical Virtual Observatory (four EC-funded Euro-VO projects and the International Virtual Observatory Alliance – IVOA) focused on data findability, accessibility, interoperability and re-usability (FAIR principles).

Participation in the ESFRI projects allows INAF to focus on their real needs in terms of infrastructure, and the experience from previous and current projects increases the feasibility of the planned facilities.

INAF, in particularly the Trieste Astronomical Observatory dedicated more than 20 years to the PLANCK project starting from the instrument design, getting the responsibility of PLANCK/LFI operation and finally the responsibility of the calibration pipeline and Scientific product release.

This project will make use of the same infrastructure used during Planck Operation and calibration pipeline running. The infrastructure is composed by 240 cores (Xeon SixCore E5645 2,40Ghz) RAM 6 GB/core connected with infiniband 40 Gbps. Together with the HPC the storage of 200 TB will be made available, it already contains all the Planck LFI data from its raw form to the latest published maps. The infrastructure just described will be enough to cover the flagging and calibration pipelines, to assess the scientific results and check the systematics a Montecarlo approach will be used and we will employ NERSC. The newest computer system at NERSC is Cori, which boasts 9300 Intel Xeon Phi nodes, and features a unique 1.5PB Cray Data Warp Burst Buffer that supports IO at a world-leading speed of 1.5 TB/sec.