The Institute of Cosmos Sciences at the University of Barcelona unravels the mysteries of the galaxy with Google Cloud and Altostratus
The challenge of capturing the essence of the Milky Way
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.
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.
Cloud as a solution to overcome on-premise barriers
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.
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.
About 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.
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