From nch@roe.ac.uk Thu Jul 7 13:44:33 2005 Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2005 11:42:18 +0100 (BST) From: Nigel Hambly To: WFCAM Science Archive Team -- Eckhard Sutorius , Mike Read , Nigel Hambly , Nicholas Cross , Bob Mann Cc: CCs for WSA weekly meeting minutes distribution -- Andrew Lawrence , Andy Adamson , John Taylor , Jim Emerson , Malcolm Stewart , Martin Hill , Mike Irwin , Peredur Williams , Stephen Warren Subject: WFAU WSA weekly project meeting: 7th July 2005 Minutes of WFCAM Science Archive meeting: 7th July 2005 ------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------- Present: NCH, PMW, MAR, ETWS, JMS, NJC Apologies: MCH, JPE, RGM, JDT, AL DONM: 10am, Friday 15th July 2005, plate library Actions discharged: ------------------- ACTION: AL to contact SJW concerning his wishes for science verification data access. Discharged: UKIDSS policy is to limit science verification to the subset of the consortium scientists listed on the SV TWiki and registered in the "UKIDSS Testers" community. ACTION: NCH to email SJW, AL, MJI to explain the SV1 release situation. Discharged - sympathetic and encouraging response received from SJW. Actions partly discharged but continuing: ----------------------------------------- None this week. Actions carried forward from 24/06/05 meeting: ---------------------------------------------- None this week. Specific points and new actions: -------------------------------- Project management: NCH noted the VDMT get-together tomorrow in Cambridge; JMS, NCH & PMW will be attending. PMW went through the material for the reports and usual charts; progress this month has slowed considerably due to major effort on code refactoring, effort expended on non-survey functionality in the archive (not allowed for in the original plan) and staff leave. PMW noted that an offer has been made and accepted for the archive software developer. New bod Ross Collins will be starting on Aug 1st. As regards the other recruitment (archive operator), MAR has completed his review of the candidates; NCH, RGM and PMW will do the same with a view to shortlisting sometime during the first half of next week. ACTION: NCH, PMW, RGM & MAR to have a shortlisting meeting for the archive operator post sometime during 11-13 July. Finally, NCH noted that VDUC are looking to hold their next meeting within the next couple of months. WFCAM update: See the stop press pages linked from the TWiki for latest news. Comments and issues arising from CASU fortnightly minutes: The team noted the minutes of the meeting of 21/06/05. The issue concerning backlog in transfer has been addressed: all processed data (nearly 3 TB) available at July 1st have been transfered. Networking: NCH noted that DR4 has been released. It may be sensible to skip transfer and deployment of DR3 and go straight for DR4. Transfer of processed WFCAM data from CASU is routinely obtaining rates in excess of 10 MByte/s - plenty fast enough to keep up with the overall data rate in the dataflow system. Hardware: Public database and mass file storage archive servers are functioning normally. BUT: last week, a major breakdown of an air conditioning unit in server room C1 occured, resulting in an uncontrolled defrost of the unit behind the archive servers, a cascade of water at the back of the cabinets, and a steady rise in ambient temperature over the last week. Miraculously, no permanent damage appears to have been done. NCH got premises to get the aircon contractors in on Wednesday to fix the errant unit, and the temperature in C1 is back to nominal again. Unfortunately, and this is too much of a co-incidence to put down to any other reason, the database load-server ahmose appears to have been affected. Yesterday, during SV1 ingest, the server crashed. All attempts to reactivate the machine and it's associated RAID arrays have failed. The service contractors have been called in, but at this stage all ingest and curation procedures have stalled, and it is not known when they can resume. The broader issue of power consumption and dissipation in C1 was raised by PMW. NCH agreed that the best solution is to move the old RAID server cosaxp6 and all associated peripherals out of C1, back into the SuperCOS area. This is particularly important since we now need to purchase further disks for WFCAM data storage. ACTION: PMW to initiate removal of old hardware from C1 by communicating with all concerned parties (JNTD, HMG, RL, ...) ACTION: NCH, ETWS & PMW to discuss offline the requirements for expansion of RAID storage for the archive servers. Software: Much work has taken place over the last two weeks on functionality for non-survey data. Many miscellaneous tweaks have been necessary to much of the software. NJC thanks CASU for their input concerning the global photometric calibration document - he is following up some of the issues raised. Data Release: Again, release of SV1 is delayed, owing to circumstances beyond our control. MAR raised the issue of what our policy should be for serving large amounts of non-survey data: he suggested that we may get requests for complete non-survey datasets from PIs. Network transfer of such data sets should probably be discouraged; NCH suggested that we may be able to offer (occaisionally, not routinely!) to ship bulk data on LTO tape in RICE compressed FITS format, but that this should be discouraged. The team agreed that modifying the web interface to enable network transfer should not be necessary. SSA: Nothing new this week Astrogrid deployment: No news this week. Miscellaneous: Nothing else new this week.