Abstract
The Spitzer Science Center's MOPEX software is a part of the Spitzer Space Telescope's operational pipeline that enables detection of cosmic ray collisions with the detector array, masking of the corrupted pixels due to these collisions, subsequent mosaicking of image fields, and extraction of point sources to create catalogs of celestial objects. This paper reports on our experiences in parallelizing the parts of MOPEX related to cosmic ray rejection and mosaicking on a 1,024-processor cluster computer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The architecture and performance of the new Parallel MOPEX software are described. This work was done in order to rapidly mosaic the IRAC shallow survey data, covering a region of the sky observed with one of Spitzer's infrared instruments for the study of galaxy clusters, large-scale structure, and brown dwarfs.