Status of the DESI Instrument and Spectroscopic Pipeline

The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) is composed of 5000 robotically positioned optical fibers mounted on the 4m KPNO Mayall TeIescope that transmit light to ten broad-band spectrographs. Since beginning Survey Validation just over one year ago, DESI has already acquired the spectra of millions of objects, forming one of the largest astronomical spectroscopic datasets from a single instrument to date. In this talk we will discuss the instrument, its capabilities, and the software developed to control its operation and process the data within hours of acquisition for the rapid assessment of data quality and uniformity.