The project
ANR-B3DCMB is an interdisciplinary project funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR) and aiming at addressing some major challenges in data analysis of current and forthcoming data sets of cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy data.
The B3DCMB project will infuse data analysis of CMB data sets with novel techniques motivated by the cutting edge research in high performance scientific computing and appropriate for the most promising statistical approaches, which we will select not only on the basis of their statistical merit but also considering whether they permit efficient computational solutions and implementations appropriate for novel architectures of current and anticipated the largest massively parallel supercomputers.
While working towards this goal, we expect that the CMB data analysis problems will motivate new ideas or even lines of research in high performance scientific computing and statistics.
The science
The ultimate goal of this project is to enable the next round of cosmological discoveries, improving our understanding of the Universe, in which we live in. This is to be achieved by ensuring that the precious information encoded in a pattern of CMB polarization fluctuations, as observed by current and future observatories, is thoroughly and robustly exploited. This project will contribute to this effort by providing novel techniques and tools for CMB data analysts with which to approach the enormous and very complex, forthcoming data sets. We expect that the new methods and tools will be of more general interest and will enrich the toolkit of high performance scientific computing techniques used in many other scientific and non-scientific contexts. We also hope that this project will provide new fruitful perspectives on statistical approaches.
The team
The B3DCMB collaboration brings together cosmologists, computer scientists, applied mathematicians and statisticians from the Paris area, involving in total ~10 researchers from 4 French laboratories,
and includes international collaborators from,
- Astrophysics Sector of International School for Advanced Studies, SISSA (Italy);
- Computational Cosmology Center of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (US).
who complement the France-based team providing complementary expertise as well as a broader setting which this project is performed in.