From nch@roe.ac.uk Fri Mar 12 16:43:53 2004 Date: Fri, 12 Mar 2004 11:02:45 +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, 12 March 2004 Minutes of WFCAM Science Archive meeting: 12th March 2004 ------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------ Present: MAR, RGM, NCH, ETWS, PMW, IAB, JDT Apologies: JPE, HMG, JMS, GPS, MCH, AL DONM: 10am, Friday 19th March 2004, plate library. Actions discharged: ------------------- ACTION: NCH to email Paul Hirst and ask to see a copy of the WFCAM UG. Discharged; team examining doc; NCH has sent initial feedback. 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 5/03/04 meeting: ----------------------------------------------- None. Specific points and new actions: -------------------------------- Project management: PMW noted that JMS has been looking into some new project management tools that could help us: JMS noted: "After our meeting I had a chat with Peredur about earned value. To my completly untrained eye, http://www.evms.doe.gov/reference/docs/Desktop.pdf says in a single page (almost) all that needs knowing. If we assign a value to each item in the CASU and WFAU spreadsheets, then each month we can calculate an Earned Value and measure progress, which can be used to estimate completion date and/or actual cost. We can look at things in whatever level of granularity we want. (There will still be subjectivity and garbage-in-garbage-out still applies of course, but even so ...) To start we have to define the value of each component in some units. For us, the estimated effort from now (or e.g. 1 April) to completion is probably what we should use. This would constitute a fixed value, not a continually updated estimate (value and cost are different, even if they start off being the same)." NCH asked who has the VDFS URD; half the team have currently read it. NCH requested that we close out this over the next week so that comments can be sent to WJS and JPE. Comments and issues arising from CASU fortnightly minutes: No new minutes this week. Networking: Nothing new this week. Hardware: NCH reported that after compiling a summary of the hardware/software configuration of the catalogue servers and suggesting to Eclipse that we send to Tyan, Seagate, Adaptec and Microsoft for advice from their respective technical support people, Eclipse had immediately got on the phone to reassure us that they are looking into the disk IO problem full time (and therefore we should hold off sending any such request for help just at the moment). The situation with server ahmose is that it continues to be stable (apart from one small burst of errors earlier this week) while amenhotep is being reconfigured in the labs at Eclipse (Ian Davidson is working full time on the problem). A number of issues have arisen with that server that were probably compounding our problems (although not causing them), eg. motherboard and server backplane problems. Eclipse have set up a system at U160 with W2K in an attempt to produce a fully stable machine, and will then slowly change (U320, W2K3) to see at what point things start to fall over. NCH has been promised continual updates as to progress at the end of this week and beginning of next; and also we have been reassured that Eclipse are taking this extremely seriously and keen to solve the problem asap in order that their reputation with us remain intact. RGM noted that we have a contact name of a Microsoft person with whom we can communicate if the situation does not improve rapidly. ACTION: RGM to send details of Microsoft support bod to NCH. Software: IAB reported: "Code with major refactoring has now been checked into the CVS. CSV files corresponding to all required tables can now be generated. Have added constraint functionality for tables like MultiframeSetUp to prevent repitition of row data from the files. Catalog CSV files for ~180 input FITS files with ~2000 sources each, are generated in just under 1 minute." NCH suggested we should close out CU3/4 now as far as it is possible to do so (in lieu of any explicit calibration metadata details from CASU) in order that we can go onto other things; the team agreed that this was important. ETWS and NCH have been continuing working on CU19 and CU20. SSA: NCH reported that the USNOB join to the SSA (spatial join of two one-billion-row tables) took 40 hours but unfortunately fell over after this period due to SQL scripting bugs. This will be rerun over the weekend, in addition to any remaining indexing. Then we should meet to examine final deployment of the SSA, including checking the following issues: documentation (including cookbook), query logging etc for usage statistics, user limits (eg. query timeouts, data volume limits), downloadable PSSA and instructions, helpdesk support and FAQ logging. ACTION: NCH, RGM & MAR to meet Monday 2pm to close out the deployment of the full SSA. Miscellaneous: Nothing else this week.