Supercomputing in the Age of Discovering Superearths, Earths and Exoplanet Systems

With the Kepler Mission, exoplanet science has entered the era of Big Data and has benefited tremendously from the availability of the NAS (NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division) Pleiades supercomputer. This presentation provides an overview of the history of exoplanet discoveries and highlights the key enabling technologies for Kepler. I provide an overview of the Kepler science pipeline and the algorithms used to analyze the data and detect transiting planets, all of which run routinely on the NAS Pleiades system. The presentation also provides a description of the Blender analysis program used to validate Kepler planet discoveries statistically, and the effort to discover exomoons lurking in Kepler data, both of which also run on Pleiades. Finally, I describe NASA's TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) Mission, which leverages Kepler heritage to provide a science pipeline similar to that for Kepler and that will also run routinely on the NAS Pleiades supercomputer.