11-06, 14:30–14:45 (US/Arizona), Talks
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a heterogeneous Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) array that captures horizon-scale resolution images of black holes, utilizes the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to process its data and construct its images. Using cloud-native technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes, the collaboration was able to scale its analyses and process its data with bit-to-bit reproducibility. In this talk, I will briefly overview EHT's data pathway, describe how GCP was used by the collaboration, and address some technical challenges and their resolutions. I will also outline the future plans for the EHT computing infrastructure and data processing pipelines.
Chi-kwan "CK" Chan is an Associate Astronomer/Research Professor at the University of Arizona. He leads both the Software and Data Compatibility and the Gravitational Physics Working Groups of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). CK created the collaboration's computational and data processing infrastructures and continues to manage them to this day. In addition to pioneering the use of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to accelerate the modeling of black holes, CK also developed many new algorithms to improve and accelerate modern research, built cloud computing infrastructures for large observational data, and applied machine learning algorithms to speed up and automate data processing.