From nch@roe.ac.uk Fri Jul 29 16:31:04 2005 Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2005 11:57:11 +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 meeting minutes: 29th July 2005 Minutes of WFCAM Science Archive meeting: 29th July 2005 ------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------- Present: NCH, PMW, ETWS, JMS, MAR, RSC Apologies: MCH, JPE, JDT, NJC, RGM, AL DONM: 10am, Friday 5th August 2005, plate library Actions discharged: ------------------- ACTION: PMW, NCH & RGM to meet Friday PM to examine resource requirements for VST public survey science archiving. Discharged; staff and computing requirements have been assessed and will be documented for future meetings/reference. ACTION: NCH to put notes on archive release history, UKIDSS SV topic and communicate with CASU regarding Petrosian flux measures. Discharged; awaiting further feedback from community Actions partly discharged but continuing: ----------------------------------------- ACTION: PMW to initiate removal of old hardware from C1 by communicating with all concerned parties (JNTD, HMG, RL, ...) PMW & EBT have started to move cabinets out of the SuperCOS computer room. Eclipse will be warned of the imminent move of Alpha server, RAID arrays and associated peripherals. PMW requested help be available for lifting and carrying cabinetry. - continues. ACTION: MAR to liaise with MCH/JDT/ITsupport concerning shifting of the grendels out of C1. - continues; some uncertainty over availability of the necessary network ports (DMZ) in the east tower, but the situation is being looked into. Actions carried forward from 15/07/05 meeting: ---------------------------------------------- ACTION: NCH to investigate the usefulness of a NAS solution for medium term archive mass storage. Continues ACTION: JDT and MAR to continue sorting out AG access option functionality for saving WSA results to "MySpace". Continues Specific points and new actions: -------------------------------- Project management: NCH first of all welcomed Dr. Ross Collins (RSC) who has joined us as an archive software developer. NCH noted his attendance of the UKIDSS survey heads meeting in Durham this week, and that encouraging comments about the archive interface and SV1 release have been received. Further issues arising are noted below in Software. PMW noted his major review of the functionality requirements for VDFS along with planning work for the next few quarters. Much discussion ensued about interface functionality and priorities: the revised plans now include: V2: Hard-wired cross-query builder for UKIDSS/LAS and SDSS/2MASS to aid users in the most common cross-catalogue queries (users seem to be a bit reticent/confused about the free-form SQl syntax); a simple on-the-fly mosaicing tool for ~1 degree images to see what the demand is for such facilities; V2 is intended to be finished by the end of Q3 2005 V3: enhanced catalogue maintenance tools to include standard list-driven photometry only (fully flexible functionality to be delayed to V5); interface tools to include user upload & cross-match facility; V3 is intended to be completed at the end of Q1 2006. PMW will document and tidy up existing documentation with a view to presenting these revised plans to VDMT and then VDUC; PMW will additionally distribute the Q3 working plan for quarterly reporting. WFCAM update: See the stop press pages linked from the TWiki for latest news. Comments and issues arising from CASU fortnightly minutes: No new minutes as of 29/7/05. Networking: No news this week. Hardware: All hardware still functioning normally. Software: NCH noted some issues regarding overall software progress/enhancements and their priorities that have arisen recently: 1) Schema modifications are already required: a) merged source tables (particularly with reference to propagation of point/extended flux measures) and b) quality control metadata; 2) non-survey data: increasing numbers of requests are being received for non-survey access from PIs; ACTION: NCH, MAR, ETWS & RSC to meet on Monday PM to review the state of readiness for release of non-survey products 3) Library JPEG production in parallel: it has become apparent that production of the quick-look library JPEGs is taking a lot of time, and the obvious solution is to parallelise on the available CPUs associated with the mass file store. ETWS has been looking into this possibility. 4) ingest/curation mods needed for any schema changes: these should be small and easy given the schema-driven code functionality; The team discussed these issues and decided that the priority was to get SV2 out asap with any gross bugs fixed, but otherwise to keep is as close to SV1 as reasonably possible to give users a stable data model and await for the inevitable changes required by user feedback. Other items not discussed at this stage are: `plane sweep' generalised source pairing for a variety of applications, and a general review of C/C++ codes for tidy-up. Data Release: Work on SV2 release continues. SSA: Nothing new this week Astrogrid deployment: Nothing new this week. Miscellaneous: Nothing else this week.