Welcome to AXS

Astronomy Extensions for Spark, or AXS, is a distributed framework for astronomical data processing based on Apache Spark. AXS provides simple Python API to enable fast cross-matching, querying and analysis of data from astronomical catalogs.

Prerequisites

Before running AXS make sure you have Java v8 installed and JAVA_HOME variable set.

You will also need Python 3 with numpy, pandas and arrow packages.

Installing

To install AXS follow these steps (note that Anaconda installer is planned for the future):

1. Download the latest AXS tarball from the realeases page.
2. Unpack the tarball to a directory of your choosing.
3. Set SPARK_HOME environment variable to point to the extraction directory.
4. Add SPARK_HOME/bin to your PATH variable.
5. Run the axs-init-config.sh script to update spark-defaults.conf and hive-site.xml files with the exact SPARK_HOME path.

And you're good to go!

Further reading

Read more about starting and using AXS, and its architecture, in the documentation.

If you are using AXS in your scientific work, please cite this paper.