Kueng Rafael

Abstract Reference: 31679
Identifier: P6.14
Presentation: Poster presentation
Key Theme: 6 Python in Astronomy

A Citizen Science Powered Distributed Modeling Software Stack Written in Python: SpaghettiLens

Authors:
Kueng Rafael, Saha Prasenjit, Jonathan Coles

We present an up and running software stack called SpaghettiLens used in a Citizen Science context to allow volunteers to create mass models of strong gravitational lenses.

The stack features an interactive, web-based user interface (HTML5) running on a python based web server (django) which communicates with a document oriented, NoSQL database (couchDB) and an asynchronous task distribution system (celery). It gathers raw image data from different online sources and delivers it to users for being modeled. It then gets the users input, distributes the computationally heavy task of creating and visually rendering models (glass) to dedicated worker nodes in different physical locations and returns a rendered version of the model to the user for visual feedback. The stack is written mostly in python and designed to be massively scalable.