DETECTING VARIABILITY IN ASTRONOMICAL TIME SERIES DATA: APPLICATIONS OF CLUSTERING METHODS IN CLOUD COMPUTING ENVIRONMENTS

We present applications of clustering methods to detect variability in massive astronomical time series data. Focusing on variability of bright stars, we use clustering methods to separate possible variable sources from other time series data, which include intrinsically non-variable sources and data with common systematic patterns. We already finished the analysis of the Northern Sky Variability Survey data, which include about 16 million light curves, and present candidate variable sources with their association to other data at different wavelengths. We also apply our clustering method to the light curves of bright objects in the SuperWASP Data Release 1. For the analysis of the SuperWASP data, we exploit a elastically configurable Cloud computing environments that the KISTI Supercomputing Center is deploying. Two quite different configurations are incorporated in our Cloud computing test bed. One system uses the Hadoop distributed processing with its distributed file system, using distributed processing with data locality condition. Another one adopts the Condor and the Lustre network file system. We present test results, considering performance of processing a large number of light curves, and finding clusters of variable and non-variable objects.