Computing and Data Challenges for Multi-Messenger Astronomy

The emerging generation of instruments that will probe the cosmos in the coming decades will measure an unprecedented number of astrophysical phenomena, including photons from many energy ranges, neutrino flux, and gravitational waves. Data from individual instruments is growing to exabyte scale and the necessary associated data systems will be capable of unprecedented rates of prompt notifications of transient events. The volumes of data from simulations are comparable to the volumes from the instruments. The interplay of extreme-scale computation and simulation with the observational data that is a combination of a variety of physical observations opens new horizons of research. This ensemble of techniques gives rise to new opportunities in Multi Messenger Astronomy. At the University of Illinois, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the Department of Astronomy have a long history of involvement in astrophysical simulation as well as data- and compute-intensive observational astronomy, including data management for the Dark Energy Survey and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. My talk will highlight some of the challenges of multi messenger astronomy, the systems used to combine data from these peta-and exascale instruments, and the vision of the University of Illinois for this new era of multi messenger science.