CADAC

=CADAC Introduction= Test problem pages: Overview, **CADAC**, Data Access, Work Area Setup, Path Setup, Utilities, Grid Data, SPH Data, Running, Reporting

Dear KITP workshop participant,

We are happy to announce the launch of the **[|Computational Astrophysics Data Analysis Center (CADAC)]**, a collaboration of the Physics Department at the University of California, San Diego, and the San Diego Supercomputer Center. The CADAC is a free service for the astrophysics community. It will host a public data collection from large astrophysical simulations and will provide data-analysis resources to researchers worldwide. The main goal is to foster a new system and culture whereby data-analysis tools and computational data are efficiently shared, in order to encourage scientific collaborations, increase the impact of numerical experiments, and facilitate the peer review process of publications based on computational simulations.

The CADAC presently offers 100TB of permanent disk space, virtually unlimited tape space, automatic replication to tape of the data collection, two IBM p690 data-analysis nodes, each with 32 POWER4+ processors and 256GB of shared memory, and data-analysis and graphic visualization software such as IDL and VAPOR. We hope that this data-storage and data-analysis environment will help our community in dealing with large computational datasets, making them available to a large number of researchers, including students.

We are currently launching the CADAC primarily as a service in support of the KITP workshop “Star Formation Through Cosmic Time”, but we envision the CADAC as a service for the whole astrophysics community. As such, the CADAC will continue to serve you and facilitate your collaborations well beyond the workshop, its storage and data-analysis resources will be expanded, and the number of its users will grow.


 * With this announcement we would like to invite you to become a CADAC user.** If you run numerical simulations and have large datasets that you would like to share with your closest collaborators or with the rest of us, we kindly invite you to transfer such data into the CADAC collection, where it will be permanently online and you and others can take advantage of powerful data-analysis resources. If you do not run numerical experiments, but are interested in carrying out original data-analysis of published simulations, you can also be a CADAC user. Indeed, we hope to increase the scientific impact of numerical experiments by giving you access to large datasets, whether you run simulations or not. Please refer to the CADAC website (cadac.sdsc.edu) for user documentation that will be posted there very soon.

We kindly ask you to acknowledge the use of CADAC facilities in your publications with the following sentence: “//This research made use of the Computational Astrophysics Data Analysis Center.//” We also invite you to signal such publications to the CADAC team to be linked in the CADAC website.

If you would like to become a CADAC user, please send an email to ppadoan@ucsd.edu, with subject “New CADAC user” and with the following personal information:
 * 1) First Name
 * 2) Last Name
 * 3) Institution
 * 4) Street
 * 5) City
 * 6) State (for U.S locations)
 * 7) ZIP code (for U.S locations)
 * 8) Country
 * 9) Phone
 * 10) Email
 * 11) Status (faculty, research staff, post doctorate, graduate or undergraduate student)
 * 12) Login name, if former or current teragrid user

I will give you your temporary password personally in Santa Barbara, or through a telephone call if you will not be at the workshop yet. You are welcome to become a CADAC user from now, even if you will not participate to the workshop from the very beginning, and you will be able to continue to be a CADAC user after the end of the workshop as well. See you in Santa Barbara, Paolo Padoan