  The Dark Energy Survey (DES) is a project with the goal of building,
installing and exploiting a new 74 CCD-camera at the Blanco telescope, in order
to study the nature of cosmic acceleration. It will cover 5000 square degrees
of the southern hemisphere sky and will record the positions and shapes of 300
million galaxies up to redshift 1.4. The survey will be completed using 525
nights during a 5-year period starting in 2012. About O(1 TB) of raw data will
be produced every night, including science and calibration images. The DES data
management system has been designed for the processing, calibration and
archiving of these data. It is being developed by collaborating DES
institutions, led by NCSA. In this contribution, we describe the basic
functions of the system, what kind of scientific codes are involved and how the
Data Challenge process works, to improve simultaneously the Data Management
system algorithms and the Science Working Group analysis codes.
