Organized by Klaus Honscheid and Eric Huff
CCAPP postdocs and students have played an important role in DES. A long-term investment in time and resources paid off with visible results and opportunities for leadership within the broader collaboration. Software tools and algorithms developed here played a key role in the analysis, and their development produced expertise and credibility that enabled CCAPP to play such a significant role in the high-level, high-visibility science results. Turnover among the CCAPP postdocs and further development within the collaboration means that further investment is required to maintain this competitive position.
The next generation of DES measurement software the so-called multi-object-fitting (MOF) photometry represents a significant advance both for the collaboration and for the broader community, and it will be one of the bedrocks of the Year 3 DES analysis. While this code base currently exists, some combination of software development, testing, and tuning on current data will be required. Further, it is recognized within the collaboration that we need to do better at disseminating knowledge of the key tools and methods used for our science analysis.
The Balrog code, developed here at OSU, has also been recognized by the collaboration as a priority for development and deployment on DES data for the Year 3 analyses. As with the MOF pipeline, some further development and tuning is required for this to be useful, and the injection simulation technique is likely to be useful for other future projects in surveys CCAPP is involved in (DESI, LSST, WFIRST).
There is considerable overlap between the people and the software involved in both of these code bases. It would be useful for all involved to gather the key players and aspiring entrants in each together for several days, in order to coordinate development and testing, and to bring new people up to speed. In addition to its utility to DES, this sort of workshop would have concrete benefits for DES CCAPPers, who would both be recognized for their infrastructure contributions, and would have the opportunity to become involved with and proficient in the best current tools for the science they're likely to be doing in the near future.
There were 11 participants.