Cloud Services as an environment for large scale astronomical image analytics.

The Large Synoptic Sky Survey is a next generation sky survey. LSST will produce 15-30TB of data a night and, at the end of the survey, promises to deliver the largest non-proprietary dataset in the world, estimated to consist of 60PB of raw data and a 15PB catalog. To process the data and produce the catalog, the LSST Software Stack implements many new and advanced astronomical image analysis techniques. Making these techniques availible to the astronomical community would benefit individual users through to small scale surveys. Our ability to use the LSST Software and deliver on its full potential is, however, limited by the expertise, compute and storage resources required to deploy and run on scale. Cloud Services have already been identified as a prime resource for large scale data storage and analytics. Their adoption by the astronomy community has been slow because much of the functionality …