Performance-related Aspects in the Big Data Astronomy Era: Architects in Software Optimization

In the last decades the amount of data collected by astronomical instruments and the evolution of computational demands have grown exponentially. Today it is not possible to obtain scientific results without prodigious amounts of computation. For this reason, the software performance plays a key role in modern Astronomy data analysis. Scientists tend to write code with the only goal of implementing the algorithm in order to achieve a solution: code modifications to gain better performance always come later. However, to facilitate this task, programming languages are progressing and introducing new features to fully make use of the hardware architecture. Designing a software that meets performance, memory efficiency, maintainability, and scalability requirements is a complex task that should be addressed by a software architect. In this paper we present the software refactoring and optimization activity performed at the Italian Science Data Center for the ESA's cosmological space mission Euclid.