Array Similarity Join for Real-Time Astronomy

Investigators: Florin Rusu, John Wu

Challenge

The catalog matching step is the bottleneck in the real-time workflows of Palomar Transient Factory. The task generalizes to a class of array similarity join using database terminology.

Our Solution

By formalizing the array similarity join, we deiscovered new venues of optimization, and produced a balanced heuristic for vertex cover (BHVC) for query planning.

Outcome

A much more efficient query processing algorithm

Applications

Significantly reducing the time needed for catalog machine in PTF