The Institute of Cosmos Sciences at the University of Barcelona unravels the mysteries of the galaxy with Google Cloud and Altostratus
About Institute of Cosmos Sciences at the University of Barcelona (ICCUB)
The Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona (ICCUB) is dedicated to research in cosmology, astrophysics and particle physics. Created in 2006, it has become a research center of excellence with more than 50 long-term scientists, 15 engineers and 65 postdoctoral researchers and PhD students. It receives annual funding of 4 million euros and produces some 300 scientific publications per year.
The challenge of capturing the essence of the Milky Way
In its goal of unlocking the secrets of the Milky Way, the ICCUB embarked on the Gaia project. To do so successfully, it was necessary to analyze and store an enormous amount of astrophysical data.
The Gaia Mission is a highly complex project that aims to create an accurate and detailed three-dimensional map of the Milky Way encompassing its more than two billion stars.
Every day, Gaia’s camera captures about 70 million images and sends back to Earth between 45 and 100 gigabytes of data. For a three-dimensional map, it is necessary to meticulously store and analyze all these interrelated astrophysical data. On the other hand, this analysis requires complex scientific exploitation using Big Data and data mining techniques.
Cloud as a solution to overcome on-premise barriers
For ICCUB it would have been impossible to carry out the Gaia project using on-premise data centers due to the high cost that this would have meant. Aware of this reality, the University of Barcelona sought an innovative approach in its IT strategy and found the ideal solution in the Google Cloud public cloud, together with the collaboration of a partner integrator of these technologies such as Altostratus.
In that sense, the project involved the provisioning of infrastructures in Google Cloud by Altostratus, starting from a Cloud Foundation.
This was carried out from on-premise environments and from supercomputing centers such as BSC, using services such as Virtual Machines and high-performance Databases.
On the other hand, to take full advantage of GCP capabilities, the IaaS and Data team of Altostratus carried out specific trainings to the ICCUB technical team in the new AI and analytics resources, such as Vertex AI or BigQuery.
Large-scale computing for more agile research
This project has enabled ICCUB to provide its scientists with a tailored computing environment, from high-performance virtual machines to large-scale computing on clusters that can be scaled as needed, in some cases reducing computing time from over a year to weeks.
Using Compute Engine and managed services such as BigQuery and Vertex AI, the University of Barcelona can now store and analyze 2B of records from the Gaia satellite and perform queries quickly, advancing its research on the evolution of the Milky Way and avoiding high investments in physical servers.
The Gaia mission has had a significant impact on the European academic astrophysics field as a pioneering project in the use of cloud infrastructures. Since then, the benefits of the public cloud have been demonstrated and shared with the entire scientific community.
A turning point for scientific research in Europe
The adoption of the Cloud in this project, in addition to providing viability, is a turning point for scientific research initiatives in other European countries.
The Gaia mission has had a significant impact on the European academic astrophysics field as a pioneering project in the use of cloud infrastructures. Since then, the benefits of the public cloud have been demonstrated and shared with the entire scientific community.
Many of the questions that ICCUB and ESA are asking about the Milky Way are being answered thanks to the Big Data generated by the Gaia satellite. “We hope that ICCUB’s collaboration with Google Cloud will become the precursor step towards widespread adoption of cloud computing in the scientific research community in Europe. This will open the doors to a universe of opportunities,” says Dr. Luri, director of ICCUB.
