From nch@roe.ac.uk Fri Oct 17 12:14:45 2003 Date: Fri, 17 Oct 2003 12:04:29 +0100 (BST) From: Nigel Hambly To: WFCAM Science Archive Team -- Clive Davenhall , Eckhard Sutorius , Harvey MacGillivray , Ian Bond , Mike Read , Nigel Hambly , Bob Mann Cc: Andrew Lawrence , Peredur Williams , Andy Adamson , Jim Emerson , Mike Irwin Subject: WFAU WSA weekly meeting minutes: 17th October 2003. Minutes of WFCAM Science Archive meeting: 17th October 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------- Present: ETWS, IAB, PMW, NCH, MAR Apologies: JMS, AL, RGM, HMG, JPE Actions discharged: ------------------- None this week. Actions partly discharged but continuing: ----------------------------------------- ACTION: ALL to review risk register and think of any new internal or external risks that should be documented in the risk register. (this one is now important again in the light of recent AGOC meetings and request from JPE to revise the register. See Project Management below). ACTION: RGM to progress design of a web cookbook based around the 20 Queries. (started) (still continues: 2/3 done) (RGM on leave from 10/10/03) ACTION: NCH, ETWS to create schema-driven tags for ingest procedure, and to code up proto-curation populating scripts for the WSA for test purposes. (schema tags to drive ingest are being implemented in revised schemas in the CVS. Proto-curation populating scripts have yet to be started) (NCH still hasn't started the curation scripts - see S/W below) - continuing; thanks for progressing these. Actions carried forward from 03/10/03 meeting: ---------------------------------------------- ACTION: PMW to liaise with AL to make sure that Compute Support are made aware, from the highest "official" level, of our requirements, re. 100 Gbyte/day transfer from CASU, and to impress on them that the 1 Gbit/s FW should be their highest priority. ACTION: JPE to design and set up centralised VDFS web pages. (is clearly very important given input from AGOC members. See Project Management) - CONTINUE Specific points and new actions: -------------------------------- Project management: NCH and PMW informed the group about the immediate aftermath of the AGOC meeting at Cambridge on 10 Oct. JPE has been actioned to take forward four points concerning VDFS management and will likely request materials from PMW & NCH as and when. The question of a comprehensive risk register and revised plan in the light of WFCAM delays has already been requested. In particular, the mitigation of risks by descoping needs to be thouroughly worked out and documented. ACTION: NCH & PMW to meet Mon am to revisit the project plan and risk register in the light of recent AGOC advice and the WFCAM slips. NCH suggested that some of the committee's request for info would have been served by a set of centralised web pages detailing the VDFS top-level business plan, but JPE has yet to arrange this. NCH & PMW reported that the WSA updates and SSA demo at the AGOC meeting were very well received and appeared to have left the panel with a good impression as to progress on the archiving side of VDFS; similarly MJI's pipeline update and illustrations were well received. NCH informed the group as to the latest developments on the VEGA funding proposal and that things are likely to develop quickly over the next month or so. Until VEGA is finalised, the exact mechanism and timescale for WFAU grant renewal will remain uncertain. Hardware: JNTD has informed NCH that Seagate firmware patches have been made on all disks on ahmose, and is in progress on amenhotep. NCH will continue with full SSA installation on ahmose. Software: IAB reported: "1 - I've factored out the Sloan C++ source for htm ID calculation into a separate library. This library can be accessed by other projects with WSA by linking to libhtm.a. This is all in the CVS under htmsrc. 2 - I've added some code to the CVS for generating FITS images and catalog extensions. This can be used to simulate large numbers of pixel and catalog files which can be used to test the data ingestion architecture. 3 - Added skeleton python binding to the C++ middleware for extracting data from FITS files for ingestion into the archive." ETWS reported continued work on schema parsing scripts for foreign key assignments. NCH reported that Alex Szalay is very keen to have our schema and procedure for binary loading of the USNOB catalogue. ACTION: NCH & ETWS to finalise USNOB binary load scripts and to send these and the schema to Alex at JHU. NCH reported that HTM2 is now available from JHU as a result of touching base at ADASS. ACTION: NCH to get HTM2 from JHU. NCH has not progressed the curation scripts for the WSA owing to AGOC and ADASS attendance. ACTION: NCH to try to start the WSA curation populating scripts before the next meeting. Networking: NCH reported chatting to Guy Rixon (IoA) at ADASS, who has suggested that it may be worth looking again at GridFTP. NCH suggested that a test on djoser was likely worthwhile given it's 1 Gb/s connectivity and GridFTP server availability at IoA. ACTION (deferred): ETWS to contact Guy Rixon concerning a new GridFTP test. SSA: MAR reported further enhancements to the SSA interface, namely launchable Java applications that browse image (JIPI & Aladin) and catalogue (Topcat) data. These are launched at the touch of a button (provided that the client side has the correct Java configuration). Miscellaneous: NCH reported a constructive visit to ADASS, with useful chats and poster viewing. A report will be put on the TWiki. ACTION: NCH to put an ADASS visit report on the TWiki. NCH reported that a visit to AstroWISE (Leiden, NL) was likely to take place late Nov/early Dec (first week of Dec looks increasingly likely) and that he would go; anyone else would be welcome come - PMW expressed interest. IAB reported that he will be attending the NeSC Condor use tutorial on Mon 20th with a view to investigating possible usage of Condor (distributed processing managment) in the WSA. ACTION: NCH to type up and circulate these minutes. DONM: 10am, Friday 24th October, plate library.