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repositories. Building upon these technologies, a number of challenging applica-
tions from different A&A domains have been successfully prototyped and tested.
18.1 Introduction
Astronomy and astrophysics (A&A) has recently become a data-intensive science,
due to numerous digital sky surveys across a range of wavelengths, with many
terabytes of images and with billions of detected sources, and often with tens of
measured parameters for each of the observed objects. Moreover, high-resolution
numerical simulation codes are producing in-silico experiments that result in pet-
abytes of data to be stored and analyzed. Data is commonly produced by distributed
collaborations who involve scientists from different countries and with different
expertise that need to cooperate and exchange their knowledge. Exploring these
vast amounts of new data volumes, and actually making real scienti
c discoveries,
poses considerable technical challenges and demands a completely new way of
handling data compared to the traditional approaches used for making science in
A&A.
Recently science gateway (SG) technologies allowed the scientific research
community to create a domain work environment where researchers can concentrate
on domain problems without facing the complexities of deploying jobs on dis-
tributed resources and without
the costs of acquiring and managing high-end
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