From nch@roe.ac.uk Fri Feb 6 12:09:45 2004 Date: Fri, 6 Feb 2004 11:25:10 +0000 (GMT) From: Nigel Hambly To: WFCAM Science Archive Team -- Eckhard Sutorius , Harvey MacGillivray , Ian Bond , Mike Read , Nigel Hambly , Bob Mann Cc: CCs for WSA weekly meeting minutes distribution -- Clive Davenhall , Andrew Lawrence , Andy Adamson , Peter Shillan , John Taylor , Jim Emerson , Martin Hill , Mike Irwin , Peredur Williams Subject: WFAU WSA weekly meeting minutes, 6th February 2004 Minutes of WFCAM Science Archive meeting: 6th February 2004 ----------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------- Present: JMS, NCH, ETWS, RGM, PMW, JDT, IAB Apologies: MAR, JPE, AL, GPS, MCH, HMG DONM: 10am, Friday 13th February 2004, plate library. Actions discharged: ------------------- ACTION: NCH to attend PPRP meeting on 4/2/04 to make ANOTHER presentation as to science archive progress and forward plan. Done - see project management below. ACTION: NCH, RGM, JMS and PMW to attend the VEGA dry-run telecon on Feb 3rd, 10:30am, (AL's office?) to review the presentations for the 4th. Done. ACTION: NCH, IAB and ETWS to meet on Thurs 6th Feb pm for another integration/test session for CU1-4. Done - see Software below ACTION: PMW to get comments on the SSA cookbook to RGM within the next few days (PMW's non-expert take on the system is highly valued). Done: good input from the point of view of non-expert user. 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. Defered until top level plan is explicitly defined. PMW tabled the VISTA risk register as an example. ACTION: JPE to design and set up centralised VDFS web pages. Progressing. (there is now a link to it from our WSA Twiki). - continuing; thanks for progressing these. Actions carried forward from 23/01/04 meeting: ----------------------------------------------- None. Specific points and new actions: -------------------------------- Project management: NCH reported attending the PPRP meeting at the IoA in Cambridge. The overall impression was very positive: many detailed questions were asked following the presentations, but everyone felt the whole exercise was conducted in a very positive manner. It now remains to be seen how this translates to the level of resources (particularly with reference to the request for an extra FTE from October) allocated to VDFS. PMW and JMS reported attending the monthly VDFS management meeting via telecon. The only major point to arise was the requirement for somebody from the team to attend the VOProcPlus (?) meeting (Cambridge or Leicester?). JPE will be liasing to sort out who represents WFAU. Comments and issues arising from CASU fortnightly minutes: The meeting noted the last lot of CASU fortnightly meeting minutes. No issues arose, apart from the mouse-bat-folicle-goose-creature-ampersand, but please see Software below for a request that we agree to use md5 checksum verification for data transfer. Networking: ETWS and IAB reported breaking the transfer speed record from CASU while testing CU1. The record now stands at 12.6 MByte/s. ETWS reported: "RGM pointed out bbftp (http://doc.in2p3.fr/bbftp/) to me and I have contacted Phil Clark, who has worked with it. Unfortunately he didn't remember any transfer rates, only that it was faster than gridFTP. bbftp implements its own transfer protocol, which is optimized for large files (larger than 2GB). Since the use of it requires an installation on both ends of the connection and we had a very good day yesterday with 12.6MB/s I think we'll wait until we know more specific how good it is until we give it a try." NCH reported that transfer of the SDSS DR1 data from the SceakerNet box onto the WSA hardware has gone smoothly; the DR1 databases have been attached to the SQL Server on ahmose and appear to be fine. Tape backups are now required for: DR1, SSA intermediate new source files, all external catalogue data from amenhotep. Hence more Ultrium2 tapes are needed. ACTION: PMW to order another 2 boxes of Ultrium2 LTO tapes. Hardware: NCH reported that a minor disaster had been averted in C1 during the week when the main aircon unit had iced up completely and was actually heating the room instead of cooling it. Apparently C1 is now overcapacity as regards the exxisting aircon; the Griffin boys have alerted premises to this and HMG is keeping an eye on developments. PMW re-emphasised the need to expunge as much redundant kit as possible to alleviate the problem; but of course the only real solution is another aircon unit to provide spare capacity (especially since more disk units will be going into C1 soon). NCH reported that there was some hope that the U320 disk error problems have been solved - firmware updates on the external controller cards have been made and amenhotep now runs comfortably at U320 speed on those updated cards. We are currently awaiting updates for the onboard firmware from Tyan via Eclipse to finally test and hopefully solve the problem once and for all. Software: NCH, ETWS and IAB reported another most fruitful extreme programming session; another is pencilled in for Tues PM to finally integrate the first of the curation software scripts. ACTION: NCH, IAB and ETWS to meet Tues PM for another joint programming session. ETWS reported requesting that CASU run md5 checksums on the file sets that will be transfered to WFAU so that data integrity can be checked at the OS level. MJI has indicated that this may be OK; WFAU requests that we agree to use md5 as the OS-level checksum verification for data transfer between the CASU and WFAU RAID arrays. SSA: PMW made some good suggestions concerning the SSA cookbook. NCH reported that the schema change to the Source table has been implemented and that the l,b,d,Eb-v extra attributes have been written to new intermediate source files and are ready for loading (thanks to some quick and efficient C++ coding from IAB). Reloading will now take place, and once the controller firmware updates have been done on ahmose, deployment of the full SSA can take place. NCH noted that the SSA had been successfully tested from both Cambridge and Oxford standard ethernet-networked computers, but that from the IoA wireless network it fails to work. NAW has pointed out that client-end networks need to have the appropriate ports open (in this case, 8080 for the grendel12 connections to work) and that it would perhaps be useful for such technical information to be included in the online documentation. NCH has forwarded this info and made this suggestion to MAR. Miscellaneous: Nothing else this week.