The PI of this project, R. Knop, together with his research team at
Vanderbilt University, will lead the performance and management of this
search and related observations.  They will be supported by the rest of
the international SCP collaboration, including the supernova team at
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), which includes five
research scientists, four post-docs, three graduate students, and other
support personnel.  The SCP has access to substantial computing
resources both at Vanderbilt and at LBNL's National Energy Research
Scientific Computing (NERSC) supercomputing center; these resources will
be more than ample to perform the search and ensure efficient use of
on-sky telescope time.  Details are discussed in the Technical
Description for the CTIO Mosaic runs.

R. Knop is in the process of applying for external funding to support
travel as well as a post-doc and/or 2--3 graduate students to work on
this survey.  Even in the absence of direct support for the members of
the SCP at Vanderbilt University, the supernova team at LBNL (funded by
the DOE) as well as the rest of the SCP is committed to the success of
this survey, and will provide travel money, manpower, and equipment to
ensure that it succeeds.  R. Knop has been the primary researcher
responsible for coordinating the actual search during SCP campaigns of
recent years, and has been the primary maintainer of the search
software.  As such, he is uniquely qualified to manage this rolling
supernova search.

This project will take advantage of the survey data pipeline being
developed by the NOAO Data Products Group.  This pipeline will produce
overscan, bias, and flatfield corrected images from Mosaic at CTIO.  (If
the Data Products Group pipeline is not available at the beginning of
this survey, we will use the SCP pipeline which has been successfully
used during numerous previous CTIO~4m searches; in the past, the
preliminary reduction pipeline ran on a small number of laptop computers
brought to the observatory by the observers.)  These flatfielded images
will then be transferred to computers at LBNL and Vanderbilt, where they
will be combined and subtracted using the proven SCP search software
which has been used to discover SNe at CTIO and other telescopes.  This
survey will be an excellent test of both the pipeline of the Data
Products group, as well as in the efficient use of data produced by that
group.  It will rely on the Data Products Group to provide flatfielded
images in a timely manner, and will then quickly turn these flatfielded
images into SN discoveries which will be reported in IAU circulars, as
well as observed spectroscopically by other telescopes and published in
the astronomical literature.  Furthermore, this survey will serve as a
testbed for involvement of LBNL's NERSC supercomputing center in the
National Virtual Observatory (NVO).

The impact of the survey on NOAO resources will be modest.  The SCP will
send 1--2 observers to CTIO during each month's run to perform the
observations during each half-night of the survey.  Past experience
indicates that there will be more than sufficient network bandwidth to
send one half-night's worth of flatfielded data over the course of one
night.  While the use of the network connection will be intermittently
high, the survey will not need significant bandwidth to the USA for more
than (conservatively) $\sim10$ hours every three to four nights.  An
additional observer will be sent to KPNO and then MMT to perform
spectroscopic observations during the nights of those runs.

The runs requested are listed at the end of this section.  Please note
that the exact timing of the runs flexible, as discussed in detail in
the Technical Description for the CTIO~4m Mosaic runs.  It is possible,
for example, that subsequent years of the survey may use fields at
different declinations .  For example, the first two years of the survey
could search equatorial fields as described in the default plan here;
the last three years could move to a large negative declination (in
which case the survey could proceed without the KPNO~4m and MMT time
requested, and would be replaced by proposals to SOAR and Gemini South).

The SCP is aware that Chris Stubbs' High-z team is also proposing a
large supernova survey.  If both proposals are given time, the SCP
expects and hopes to coordinate with the other team to ensure that the
two surveys are run so as to maximize the scientific benefit of both.

\begin{verbatim}
   Observing Runs Requested for Each of the Five Years of this Project

Semester        Telescope   Instrument  # of Nights  Moon  Acceptable Months
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
2002B           CTIO-4m     Mosaic      3.5          dark  Sep or Jan
2002B           KPNO-4m     MARS        2            dark  Sep or Jan
2002B           MMT         RCHAN       1            grey  Sep or Jan
2002B or 2003A  CTIO-4m     Mosaic      4.5          dark  Oct or Feb
2002B or 2003A  KPNO-4m     MARS        3            dark  Oct or Feb
2002B or 2003A  MMT         RCHAN       1            grey  Oct or Feb
2002B or 2003A  CTIO-4m     Mosaic      3.5          dark  Nov or Mar
2002B or 2003A  KPNO-4m     MARS        4            dark  Nov or Mar
2002B or 2003A  MMT         RCHAN       1            grey  Nov or Mar
2002B or 2003A  CTIO-4m     Mosaic      3.5          dark  Dec or Apr
\end{verbatim}
This same sequence of runs is repeated for each of the subsequent four
years of the survey.