SPOKES: an End-to-End Simulation Facility for Spectroscopic Cosmological Surveys

摘要

The nature of dark matter, dark energy and large-scale gravity pose some ofthe most pressing questions in cosmology today. These fundamental questionsrequire highly precise measurements, and a number of wide-field spectroscopicsurvey instruments are being designed to meet this requirement. A key componentin these experiments is the development of a simulation tool to forecastscience performance, define requirement flow-downs, optimize implementation,demonstrate feasibility, and prepare for exploitation. We present SPOKES(SPectrOscopic KEn Simulation), an end-to-end simulation facility forspectroscopic cosmological surveys designed to address this challenge. SPOKESis based on an integrated infrastructure, modular function organization,coherent data handling and fast data access. These key features allowreproducibility of pipeline runs, enable ease of use and provide flexibility toupdate functions within the pipeline. The cyclic nature of the pipeline offersthe possibility to make the science output an efficient measure for designoptimization and feasibility testing. We present the architecture, firstscience, and computational performance results of the simulation pipeline. Theframework is general, but for the benchmark tests, we use the Dark EnergySpectrometer (DESpec), one of the early concepts for the upcoming project, theDark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI). We discuss how the SPOKESframework enables a rigorous process to optimize and exploit spectroscopicsurvey experiments in order to derive high-precision cosmological measurementsoptimally.