Getting the jump on big data for LSST

Efforts are already underway to ensure that the data the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope collects will be ready to be mined for scientific gold. On the first night the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope points its 8.4-meter mirror toward the exquisitely dark skies over Chile—probably in the year 2022—its 3.2-billion-pixel camera will record 30 trillion bytes of data about the contents of the universe. On the second night, LSST will do it again. It will do it again and again, collecting unprece...