scientist spearhead convergence
Scientists spearhead convergence of AI and HPC for cosmology
This article was originally published on the National Center for Supercomputing Applications website. In 2007, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) launched a citizen science campaign called Galaxy Zoo to enlist the public's help in classifying the hundreds of thousands of galaxy images captured by an optical telescope. Through this highly successful crowdsourcing effort, volunteers reviewed the images online to help determine whether each galaxy had a spiral or elliptical structure. Leveraging data generated by the Galaxy Zoo project, a team of scientists is now applying the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance supercomputers to accelerate efforts to analyze the increasingly massive datasets produced by ongoing and future cosmological surveys. In a new study, researchers from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory have developed a novel combination of deep learning methods to provide a highly accurate approach to classifying hundreds of millions of unlabeled galaxies.