C3: a command-line catalogue cross-matching tool for modern astrophysical survey data

Abstract

In the current data-driven science era, it is needed that data analysis techniques has to quickly evolve to face with data whose dimensions has increased up to the Petabyte scale. In particular, being modern astrophysics based on multi-wavelength data organized into large catalogues, it is crucial that the astronomical catalog cross-matching methods, strongly dependant from the catalogues size, must ensure efficiency, reliability and scalability. Furthermore, multi-band data are archived and reduced in different ways, so that the resulting catalogues may differ each other in formats, resolution, data structure, etc, thus requiring the highest generality of cross-matching features. We present C <SUP>3</SUP> (Command-line Catalogue Cross-match), a multi-platform application designed to efficiently cross-match massive catalogues from modern surveys. Conceived as a stand-alone command-line process or a module within generic data reduction/analysis pipeline, it provides the maximum flexibility, in terms of portability, configuration, coordinates and cross-matching types, ensuring high performance capabilities by using a multi-core parallel processing paradigm and a sky partitioning algorithm.