A Grid-Based Distributed Database Solution for Large Astronomy Datasets

“This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder." “Copyright IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.” DOI: 10.1109/CSSE.2008.285The volume of digital astronomical data is set to expand dramatically over the next ten years, as new satellites, telescopes and instruments come online. For example, both the VISTA and DES programmes will yield databases 20-30 terabytes in size in the coming decade. Storing and accessing such large datasets will be challenging, especially as scientific analysis will require coordinated use of several of these separate multi-terabyte databases, since they will contain complementary data, typically from observations made in different regions of the spectrum. We used these data to construct a grid-based SDSS distributed model using open grid services architecture - data access and integration (OGSA-DAI) and open grid services architecture - distributed query processing (OGSA-DQP). Finally we designed and ran a set of distributed queries against the grid-based distributed SDSS model