Affiliations: Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of
Technology, Pasadena, CA 91109, USA | CACI International Inc., Lanham, MD 20706, USA
Note: [] Corresponding author: Joseph C. Jacob, Jet Propulsion
Laboratory, 4800 Oak Grove Drive, Mail Stop 126-347, Pasadena, CA 91109-8099,
USA. Tel.: +1 818 354 0673; Fax: +1 818 393 6141; E-mail:
Joseph.C.Jacob@jpl.nasa.gov
Abstract: The Spitzer Science Center's MOPEX software is a part of the Spitzer
Space Telescope's operational pipeline that enables detection of cosmic ray
collisions with the detector array, masking of the corrupted pixels due to
these collisions, subsequent mosaicking of image fields, and extraction of
point sources to create catalogs of celestial objects. This paper reports on
our experiences in parallelizing the parts of MOPEX related to cosmic ray
rejection and mosaicking on a 1,024-processor cluster computer at NASA's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory. The architecture and performance of the new Parallel
MOPEX software are described. This work was done in order to rapidly mosaic the
IRAC shallow survey data, covering a region of the sky observed with one of
Spitzer's infrared instruments for the study of galaxy clusters, large-scale
structure, and brown dwarfs.
