BEYONDPLANCK

III. Commander3

¹ Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics, University of Oslo, Blindern, Oslo, Norway
e-mail: mathew.galloway@astro.uio.no
² Dipartimento di Fisica, Università degli Studi di Milano, Via Celoria, 16, Milano, Italy
³ INAF-IASF Milano, Via E. Bassini 15, Milano, Italy
⁴ INFN, Sezione di Milano, Via Celoria 16, Milano, Italy
⁵ INAF – Osservatorio Astronomico di Trieste, Via G. B. Tiepolo 11, Trieste, Italy
⁶ Planetek Hellas, Leoforos Kifisias 44, Marousi, 151 25 Greece
⁷ Department of Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, 08544 USA
⁸ Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, 4800 Oak Grove Drive, Pasadena, CA, USA
⁹ Department of Physics, University of Helsinki, Gustaf Hällströmin katu 2, Helsinki, Finland
¹⁰ Helsinki Institute of Physics, University of Helsinki, Gustaf Hällströmin katu 2, Helsinki, Finland
¹¹ Computational Cosmology Center, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, USA
¹² Haverford College Astronomy Department, 370 Lancaster Avenue, Haverford, PA, USA
¹³ Max-Planck-Institut für Astrophysik, Karl-Schwarzschild-Str. 1, 85741 Garching, Germany
¹⁴ Dipartimento di Fisica, Università degli Studi di Trieste, Via A. Valerio 2, Trieste, Italy

Received: 17 January 2022
Accepted: 25 February 2022

Abstract

We describe the computational infrastructure for end-to-end Bayesian cosmic microwave background (CMB) analysis implemented by the BeyondPlanck Collaboration. The code is called Commander3. It provides a statistically consistent framework for global analysis of CMB and microwave observations and may be useful for a wide range of legacy, current, and future experiments. The paper has three main goals. Firstly, we provide a high-level overview of the existing code base, aiming to guide readers who wish to extend and adapt the code according to their own needs or re-implement it from scratch in a different programming language. Secondly, we discuss some critical computational challenges that arise within any global CMB analysis framework, for instance in-memory compression of time-ordered data, fast Fourier transform optimization, and parallelization and load-balancing. Thirdly, we quantify the CPU and RAM requirements for the current BEYONDPLANCK analysis, finding that a total of 1.5 TB of RAM is required for efficient analysis and that the total cost of a full Gibbs sample for LFI is 170 CPU-hrs, including both low-level processing and high-level component separation, which is well within the capabilities of current low-cost computing facilities. The existing code base is made publicly available under a GNU General Public Library (GPL) license.