@article{a7e6fb30fce04c7485fb23397854a0f7,
title = "DESCQA: An Automated Validation Framework for Synthetic Sky Catalogs",
abstract = "The use of high-quality simulated sky catalogs is essential for the success of cosmological surveys. The catalogs have diverse applications, such as investigating signatures of fundamental physics in cosmological observables, understanding the effect of systematic uncertainties on measured signals and testing mitigation strategies for reducing these uncertainties, aiding analysis pipeline development and testing, and survey strategy optimization. The list of applications is growing with improvements in the quality of the catalogs and the details that they can provide. Given the importance of simulated catalogs, it is critical to provide rigorous validation protocols that enable both catalog providers and users to assess the quality of the catalogs in a straightforward and comprehensive way. For this purpose, we have developed the DESCQA framework for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope Dark Energy Science Collaboration as well as for the broader community. The goal of DESCQA is to enable the inspection, validation, and comparison of an inhomogeneous set of synthetic catalogs via the provision of a common interface within an automated framework. In this paper, we present the design concept and first implementation of DESCQA. In order to establish and demonstrate its full functionality we use a set of interim catalogs and validation tests. We highlight several important aspects, both technical and scientific, that require thoughtful consideration when designing a validation framework, including validation metrics and how these metrics impose requirements on the synthetic sky catalogs.",
keywords = "large-scale structure of universe, methods: numerical",
author = "Mao, \{Yao Yuan\} and Eve Kovacs and Katrin Heitmann and Uram, \{Thomas D.\} and Benson, \{Andrew J.\} and Duncan Campbell and Cora, \{Sof{\'i}a A.\} and Joseph Derose and Matteo, \{Tiziana Di\} and Salman Habib and Hearin, \{Andrew P.\} and Kalmbach, \{J. Bryce\} and Krughoff, \{K. Simon\} and Fran{\c c}ois Lanusse and Zarija Luki{\'c} and Rachel Mandelbaum and Newman, \{Jeffrey A.\} and Nelson Padilla and Enrique Paillas and Adrian Pope and Ricker, \{Paul Milton\} and Ruiz, \{Andr{\'e}s N.\} and Ananth Tenneti and Vega-Mart{\'i}nez, \{Cristian A.\} and Wechsler, \{Risa H.\} and Rongpu Zhou and Ying Zu",
note = "Y.-Y.M. is supported by the Samuel P. Langley PITT PACC Postdoctoral Fellowship and was supported by the Weiland Family Stanford Graduate Fellowship. S.A.C. acknowledges grants from Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientificas y Tecnicas (PIP-112-201301-00387), Agencia Nacional de Promocion Cientifica y Tecnologica (PICT-2013-0317), and Universidad Nacional de La Plata (UNLP 11-G124), Argentina. T.D.M. acknowledges funding from NSF ACI-1614853, NSF AST-1517593, NSF AST-1009781, NSF AST-1616168, and the BlueWaters PAID program. The MBII hydrodynamical simulation was run on the BlueWaters facility at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Argonne National Laboratory{\textquoteright}s work was supported under the DOE contract DE-AC02-06CH11357. Part of this work uses the computational resources at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, a U.S. DOE Office; we thank the support of the SLAC computational team. The framework used for this project is derived from a framework that was developed for FLASH and applied to the Dark Energy Survey by the DOE-supported ASC/Alliances Center for Astrophysical Thermonuclear Flashes at the University of Chicago; we thank Gus Evrard, Michael Busha, and Andrey Kravtsov for their contributions. We thank Joanne Cohn for discussions on validation tests. This research has made use of NASA{\textquoteright}s Astrophysics Data System. The DESC acknowledges ongoing support from the Institut National de Physique Nucl{\'e}aire et de Physique des Particules in France; the Science \& Technology Facilities Council in the United Kingdom; and the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and the LSST Corporation in the United States. DESC uses the resources of the IN2P3 Computing Center (CC-IN2P3{\textendash}Lyon/Villeurbanne{\textemdash}France) funded by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique; the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science User Facility supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231; STFC DiRAC HPC Facilities, funded by UK BIS National E-infrastructure capital grants; and the UK particle physics grid, supported by the GridPP Collaboration. This work was performed in part under DOE contract DE-AC02-76SF00515. Y.-Y.M. is supported by the Samuel P. Langley PITT PACC Postdoctoral Fellowship and was supported by the Weiland Family Stanford Graduate Fellowship. S.A.C. acknowledges grants from Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cient{\'i}ficas y T{\'e}cnicas (PIP-112-201301-00387), Agencia Nacional de Promoci{\'o}n Cient{\'i}fica y Tecnol{\'o}gica (PICT-2013-0317), and Universidad Nacional de La Plata (UNLP 11-G124), Argentina. T.D.M. acknowledges funding from NSF ACI-1614853, NSF AST-1517593, NSF AST-1009781, NSF AST-1616168, and the BlueWaters PAID program. F.L. and R.M. acknowledge the support of the Department of Energy Early Career Award program. Z.L.ʼs work was partially funded by the Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program funded by the U.S. DOE Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research and the Office of High Energy Physics. J.A.N. and R.Z. acknowledge support from DOE under grant DE-SC0007914. N.P. acknowledges support from Fondecyt 1150300, BASAL PFB-06 Centro de Astrof{\'i}sica y Tecnolog{\'i}as Afines. P.M.R. acknowledges the support and hospitality of the University of Michigan Department of Physics, where initial framework development was done during a sabbatical visit. C.V.-M. was supported by a fellowship from CONICET, Argentina. Y.Z. acknowledges the support of the CCAPP Fellowship.",
year = "2018",
month = feb,
day = "8",
doi = "10.3847/1538-4365/aaa6c3",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "234",
journal = "Astrophysical Journal, Supplement Series",
issn = "0067-0049",
publisher = "American Astronomical Society",
number = "2",
}