An Overview of the Palomar Transient Factory Pipeline and Archive at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center

The Palomar Transient Factory is conducting a wide-field, variable-cadence optical survey of the northern sky to detect transient, variable, and moving objects. As a member of the PTF collaboration, the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center has developed an image archive, a high-quality photometry pipeline, and a searchable database of detected astronomical sources. The system is capable of processing and storing 300 Gbytes of data per night over the course of the 5-year survey. With an expected total of ~ 20 billion rows, the table containing sources extracted from PTF images will be among the largest astronomical databases ever created. The survey is efficiently discovering transient sources from asteroids to supernovae, and will inform the development of future sky surveys like that of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope.