DESI

The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) is a receiver operating on the Mayall telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory. It has 5000 mechanically positioned optical fibers across the focalplane feeding light to 10 spectrographs. This cutting edge experiment allows the acquisition of tens of thousands of galactic redshifts per night.

Project Role

During my past years of work on DESI, I developed the initial implementation of the MPI parallel orchestration of the nightly processing pipeline. I also worked on a large-scale refactor and optimization of the fiber assignment codebase. I continue to help as needed with small operational issues as they come up.

During the initial R&D phase of DESI software development, I spent time exploring algorithms for maximum likelihood spectral extraction. In particular, addressing scenarios where the individual spectral traces are correlated on the CCD. That code is still available for reference, but fortunately the final hardware configuration mitigated such correlations to the point where they could be neglected in the processing.

See more details in the software section.