17 April 2003 MJI, JRL, STH, PSB, DWE, JRE Agenda ------ 1) Actions from last meeting 2) Comments on WFAU minutes and CDR papers 3) Report from Edinburgh CDR (JRL,MJI) 4) Results and implications of JAC summit hardware review (JRL,MJI) 5) Hardcopy of raw data to ESO who ? how ? (MJI) 6) Grant status (MJI) 7) Management documentation and tasks/deliverables (STH) 8) Update on work done for WPs 9) Status of web pages (DWE) 10) Group name 11) ESO deliverables/responsibles - what do we need for PDR ? 12) AOB Minutes ------- 1) Actions from last meeting * PSB has liaised with JRE. More talks will be carried out today. * DWE has updated the web pages. More later (9). * STH has produced PS versions of the Gantt chart (with help from Microsoft newsgroups). This has been placed in ~wfcam/docs/ and been signed off. * The .away files have been filled in a bit more. We were reminded to also fill in for the bank holidays as well. * Drafts of the monthly reports will be made available to CASU. * More on name changes later (10). This will have repercussions in various diagrams etc. * Project documents have been checked as OK. * There has been progress on data transfer - see later. 2) Comments on WFAU minutes and CDR papers The people associated with the WFAU group were described for PSB so that he could get a better idea of who to contact if needs be. In the Critical Design Review, document 7 (photometric calibration) was singled out. STH should have a look at this. Are they using the 2MASS model <<<< or not? MJI pointed out that Version 2 now ends after Q1 of 2005. He thought that this might have to do with aligning it with the grant. JRE queried this since V2 is supposed to end Q4 2004 and that this should not have changed. 3) Report from Edinburgh CDR (JRL,MJI) Lots of documents were presented at this meeting. Apart from a lack of manpower, there didn't seem to be any real problems. The schedule will be tight. Ian Bond showed some demos of difference imaging software. DWE should <<<< contact him to see what he's done (2001MNRAS.327..868B?). He's done some stuff with the H-alpha survey. Try and get a copy of the software, Do we need to do any more? There seemed to be a request to do arbitrarily large mosaics for the pipeline. MJI should find out more precisely what is wanted <<<< Eckhard Sutorius says that there is a data transfer problem between ROE and Cambridge. This is probably related to the firewall that they have. There was a suggestion (from them?) that the default buffer size be increased. MJI suggested putting one of their machines outside the firewall and repeating the tests. It was generally thought that this was an ROE problem. Help from CASU would be available if they ask for it. MJI and JRL were very taken with Rice compression. Although a lossy compression, it is better and faster than gzip or bzip2. There are CFITSIO routines for this where the header remains uncompressed. STH was not too sure about this since it would be unlikely that any image displaying programmes would be able to cope with these files. There was some concern about the naming of the master calibration files. More thought is needed eg. if more that one flat were to be taken in a night. <<<< There was some discussion regarding the rôles of the UKIDSS Survey Manager and Survey Scientist. Where are the responsibilities split? Who is the manager? DWE was asked to contact Steve Warren to get some clarification regarding <<<< this. 4) Results and implications of JAC summit hardware review (JRL,MJI) The hardware setup was explained. There would be 4 computers (plus some spares). One for each detector. 4 streams of data would be output to tape (one for each stream) and we would get all the tapes. These tapes would be Ultrium LTO2 tapes which can hold 200 Gb native. We would get the tapes roughly once a week, when they were full. The tapes cost $69 each and are a third of the cost of the IDE option. The tape drives cost about £6k and up to 8 can be stacked together. Cambridge would probably buy 2 drives. MJI and JRL were happy with this solution. We would keep the tape as a backup. This could also be considered as an option for sending data to ROE (if bottleneck remains or network usage costs are high). How standard are these drives? Mick will look into this. <<<< It was reported that these drives can read a tape in about 2 hours. There was mention of an observer comment database. It was unclear how this would relate to the data files. More information is needed. <<<< 5) Hardcopy of raw data to ESO who ? how ? (MJI) JRE said that he would seeing Peter Quinn of ESO on 30th April and will discuss the matter than. It is likely that ESO will prefer IDE drives. Although there will be hardware costs associated with whatever solution used, manpower will be the dominant cost. MJI said that he would prefer to deliver Multi-Extension FITS (MEF) files to ESO. 6) Grant status (MJI) This has not happened yet! They are sorting out problems at the detail level. It is expected that this will be sorted in about one month. 7) Management documentation and tasks/deliverables (STH) & 8) Update on work done for WPs STH said that the documents have been time-stamped ie. these documents are fixed and won't be altered. Updates and alterations will be carried out on documents with different names. The fixed documents have been released to the world at large. The general idea is that before each of these meetings we would report any progress on the work packages to STH. He would update the documents and give an overall report on progress and point out any problem areas. STH asked about naming conventions for the documents? JRE pointed out that ESO had a signing convention and won't accept any documents that don't follow this. ROE have decided not to follow this convention for philosophical reasons. JRE would like us to follow the ESO path. 9) Status of web pages (DWE) DWE reported that the web pages have been reorganized a bit. No password is now required for the pages except for an internal section intended for Cambridge only. The other main change is that the diary has been moved from the front page to it own page. STH suggested that the ordering of the diary page be reversed so that when you enter the page you get the most up-to-date information. Another suggestion was to reverse the months but keep the dates in order. DWE suggested a compromise where all links to the diary page would take you to the end of the page. This was agreed as an interim measure, but we should all think about how the diary page is organized. <<<< 10) Group name No consensus has been reached about this. MJI (although he wanted a name change) pointed out that there were a lot of consequences with a name change and that a number of documents and diagrams would have to be altered. Some of these don't originate from our group. 11) ESO deliverables/responsibles - what do we need for PDR ? (I didn't follow most of this, so the minutes are a bit patchy. A lot of it seemed like waffle that I couldn't grab the gist of.) There was a lot of discussion regarding what documents were needed for the Preliminary Design Review for the VDFS. These documents will be written <<<< by PSB and need to be completed by 1 July. There will be 3 documents??? They are: ???? Will Sutherland was suggested to help PSB with the science case materiel. JRE will send some documents to PSB regarding this. There is an ESO requirement that all submitted documents are in PDF format. However, there is no restriction as to how they might be generated (LaTeX or Word). A lot of VISTA documentation is in Word format. For VISTA, RAL/ATC/Durham are building the camera, while the telescope is being built by ATC. JRE will send a zip file containing documentation so that it can be placed in the internal directory. (Neither I nor Simon can remember what this documentation is about. We could just wait and see.) 12) AOB None Actions ------- STH Look at CDR document 7 (photometric calibration). DWE Contact Ian Bond at ROE re. difference imaging. MJI Find out what the mosaicing requirements really are. JRL/MJI Think deeply about the naming of the master calibration files. DWE Contact Steve Warren to get clarification regarding the responsibilities of the UKIDSS Survey Manager and Survey Scientist (and find out what's happening re. survey planning in general). MTB Investigate how standard LTO2 tape drives are. ??? Find out more about the possible observer comment database. DWE Alter links to diary page to take you to the bottom. All Think about organization of diary page. PSB Write VDFS documents for PDR.