Despite the proliferation of astronomical sky surveys in recent decades, before 2013 there was no optical survey that scanned the entire sky on a rapid cadence to find the bright, nearby transient events that can be studied in the greatest detail and have the greatest impact on our understanding of the physics behind these violent events. This changed with the creation of the All-Sky Automated Survey for SuperNovae (ASAS-SN), a long-term, all-sky survey project designed to find nearby supernovae and other bright transients. In this talk I will discuss how computing and large-scale data analysis plays a role in the ASAS-SN pipeline and how I have used ASAS-SN to find and study nearby supernovae, the transient events caused by the explosive deaths of stars.
