NDRIO White Paper: Envisioning Digital Research Infrastructure for the
  Simons Observatory
  Observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) are an incredibly
fertile source of information for studying the origins and evolution of the
Universe. Canadian digital research infrastructure (DRI) has played a key role
in reducing ever-larger quantities of raw data into maps of the CMB suitable
for scientific analysis, as exemplified by the many scientific results produced
by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) over the past decade. The Simons
Observatory (SO), due to start observing in 2023, will be able to measure the
CMB with about an order of magnitude more sensitivity than ACT and other
current telescopes. In this White Paper we outline how Canadian DRI under the
New Digital Research Infrastructure Organization (NDRIO) could build upon the
legacy of ACT and play a pivotal role in processing SO data, helping to produce
data products that will be central to the cosmology community for years to
come. We include estimates of DRI resources required for this work to indicate
what kind of advanced research computing (ARC) would best support an SO-like
project. Finally, we comment on how ARC allocations could be structured for
large collaborations like SO and propose a research data management (RDM)
system that makes public data releases available not only for download but also
for direct analysis on Canadian DRI.
