From nch@roe.ac.uk Wed Jun 23 15:26:17 2004 Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2004 14:12:56 +0100 (BST) 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: 23rd June 2004 Minutes of WFCAM Science Archive meeting: 23th June 2004 ------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------ Present: NCH, IAB, MAR, PMW, RGM, ETWS Apologies: MCH, JPE, HMG, GPS, JMS, RGM, AL, JDT DONM: 10am, Friday 2nd July, plate library. 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. 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 4/06/04 meeting: ----------------------------------------------- None this week. Specific points and new actions: -------------------------------- Project management: NCH noted the advertisements for the two new positions in the group; but raised the worry that the exposure was perhaps not as good as it could be (eg. JMS had noted that the ATC SEG were not aware of them!). The advertisement is currently on the UoE and UK universities' job vacancy web sites; it will appear in the Starlink News and AAS job register within the next week; NCH has put 20 copies of each advert on the SPIE Job Vacancy table at SPIE and will advertise the posts in his talk on Friday (thanks to MAR and JPE for suggesting these); ACTION: ETWS to send details of the RAS vacancy web pages to PMW and PMW to place the advertisements there ACTION: RGM to put an AstroGrid news item on the AG TWiki concerning the new WSA positions ACTION: PMW to ask Eleanor/Jason to put the adverts on the site-wide web site "what's new" pages, and forward adverts to UKIDSS consortium. PMW noted that: JPE had submitted a PPARC Statement of Interest to provide data products for UK-led surveys with the VST, requesting 1 dsy plus 50k equipment at each of CASU and WFAU. Nic Walton, with input from MJI and PMW, had drafted a response to the PPRP's feedback on the VEGA proposal so that the agreed money could be awarded to CASU and WFAU. We have responded to the comments of the Panel and requested a minor rephasing of the funding. Comments and issues arising from CASU fortnightly minutes: The team noted the minutes of the meeting of 8th June. There were no comments. Networking: Nothing new this week. Hardware: The catalogue server situation has deteriorated over the last two weeks; both systems have suffered stability problems and the SSA DB has been corrupted (see below). RGM (seconded by NCH) now suggest that the situation needs to be escalated to a high level ass-kicking meeting between us and Eclipse to try to sort out the way forward, including provision for upgrade/expansion paths. ACTION: NCH to arrange a meeting between Matt/Ian/Jim of Eclipse and us (NCH, RGM, PMW, JNTD, and if poss AL) to try to push the catalogue server situation forward to a satisfactory conclusion. ACTION: NCH to consult independent expert Andy Knox for more advice concerning the large SCSI disk arrays. NCH noted that he would like to secure a second full back-up of the SSA DB given the current situation. ACTION: PMW to order another 3 boxes (5 tapes each) of Ultrium LTO-2s Software: NCH noted that a lot of great coding has been done by IAB (and tested by ETWS) over the last two weeks. The core source merging applications are now completed. IAB reported: "Completed the C++ code to construct a merge data set for ingest into a database. The procedure is schema driven and as such, I have reused a lot of the code previously developed to create ingest CSV files from input FITS files. Added the ability for the merge table program to append data for ingest onto an existing file. More details are in the source documentation. Made a new directory, "testers" (should have called it "demos") in the CVS. This contains a number of example programs for testing and demonstrating the low level code, including: the C++ programs for CSV file generation for image metadata and source catalog data, the python C binings for carrying out the first stage of creating a set or merge ingest data, the C++ programs for carrying the second stage, and the python C bindings for generating jpeg files from imaging data encoded in multi extension FITS files. More details are in the source documentation." NCH has been on holiday for two weeks and at SPIE this week, so no more progress on software to report. MAR has been struggling with the catalogue servers and sorting out the local RAVE meeting; ETWS has been shadowing IAB (likewise no further progress on software to report). The team reviewed the "to do" list in the meeting minutes of the 28th May to make sure all of IABs coding has been consolidated and documented. A few outstanding items were identified for IAB to sort before leaving. SSA: Disaster: the SSA database got corrupted (we think) by a hardware failure precipitated by the same old intermittent disk system instability coming back to haunt us on the U160 speed server ahmose last week. The full SuperCOS source & detection catalogues have been offline for a few days now; NCH is restoring them from a backup. The full tables will not be available until early next week because the restore will take a few days and there is (another!) site-wide power outage at the weekend (to route power to the new building). Astrogrid deployment: No news (MCH and JDT on leave). RGM volunteered to chase them up when they return to make sure that they have everything they need in terms of hardware, access to the WSA private area network hardware etc. ACTION: RGM to chase up MCH and JDT concerning the AG deployment. Miscellaneous: NCH noted that the ADASS XIV early registration and abstract submission deadlines are August 2nd. NCH asked the team to think about who should attend and what paper(s) we should offer. The meeting itself is in Pasadena, 24-27 October. RGM suggested that we should at least present a WSA poster. NCH suggested that he shouldn't (have to) go this time since he went to the last one, and also has a GAIA meeting to attend in October. NCH thanked PMW for chairing the last meeting in his absence. Finally, NCH noted that IAB's last day on site is Wednesday 30th, so we will take him out and get him totally bladdered on the evening of Tuesday 29th.