What are the data management challenges?
The rapid cadence of the LSST observing program will produce about 30 TB per night, leading to a total database over the ten years of operations of 60 PB for the raw data, and 30 PB for the catalog database. The total data volume after processing will be several hundred PB, processed using 100 TFlops of computing power. Processing such a large volume of data, converting the raw images into a faithful representation of the universe, automated data quality assessment, and archiving the results in useful form for a broad community of users is a major challenge. There will be both mountain summit and base computing facilities, as well as a central archive facility and multiple data access centers. The data will be sent over existing optical fiber links from South America to the U.S. Although the data processing center will have substantial computing power (about 100 TFlops), current trends suggest that it will not even qualify for the top 500 list by the time of first light in 2014. Hence,
