A Grid-Based Distributed Database Solution for Large Astronomy Datasets

The volume of digital astronomical data is set to expand dramatically over the next ten years, as new satellites, telescopes and instruments come online. For example, both the VISTA and DES programmes will yield databases 20-30 terabytes in size in the coming decade. Storing and accessing such large datasets will be challenging, especially as scientific analysis will require coordinated use of several of these separate multi-terabyte databases, since they will contain complementary data, typically from observations made in different regions of the spectrum. We used these data to construct a grid-based SDSS distributed model using open grid services architecture - data access and integration (OGSA-DAI) and open grid services architecture - distributed query processing (OGSA-DQP). Finally we designed and ran a set of distributed queries against the grid-based distributed SDSS model.