General introduction
MIDAS'09 is an ANR-supported interdisciplinary project devised to bring together cosmologists, computational physicists, computer scientists and applied mathematicians to face the challenge of the tremendous volume of data as anticipated from current and forthcoming Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) experiments. Observations of the CMB are one of the main and most fruitfull ways available to us to learn about the past of our Universe. Striking technological developments as seen in the last decade, have increased their power and efficiency many-fold resulting in data sets breath-taking as much due their anticipated scientific content as well as sheer sizes. This has posed new unprecedented challenges for the efficient CMB data set mining and exploitation. The goal of the project is to facilitate a direct efficient access for CMB data analysts to the power of massively paralell supercomputers available worldwide. This is to be achieved by developing methods, algorithms, and their parallel implementations, which will, on one hand, comprehensively address the needs of the CMB data analysis and, on the other, are robust and easy to use. Follow the Research link on the left to find out more about the science objectives of MIDAS'09.
MIDAS'09 is a collaboration between the Laboratoire Astroparticule et Cosmologie (Paris, France), Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (Orsay, France), and Computational Cosmology Center (Berkeley, USA). It is funded by French Agence National de Recherche (ANR) under the 2009 edition of its Calcul Intensif programme. Additional support comes from Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA), Universite Paris-Sud in France, and National Science Foundation in the US. Follow the Partners link on the left to learn more about the collaboration.
The project involves roughly 20 researchers from France and United States, and is funded for a period of 3 years starting in December, 2009. The total cost of the project is roughly 2 M€, with the ANR contribution on the level of 0.5 M€.