From nch@roe.ac.uk Fri Sep 9 15:08:26 2005 Date: Wed, 7 Sep 2005 16:02:56 +0100 (BST) From: Nigel Hambly To: WFCAM Science Archive Team -- Eckhard Sutorius , Mike Read , Nigel Hambly , Nicholas Cross , Bob Mann , Ross Collins 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 minutes, 2nd September 2005 Minutes of WFCAM Science Archive meeting: 2nd September 2005 ------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------- Present: NCH, MAR, RSC, NJC, PMW, ETWS, AL Apologies: MCH, RGM, JDT, JPE, JMS DONM: 10am, Friday 9th September 2005, plate library Actions discharged: ------------------- ACTION: PMW to initiate removal of old hardware from C1 by communicating with all concerned parties (JNTD, HMG, RL, ...) Discharged. ACTION: NCH liase with JNTD to sort out Windows accounts, file share access and an increased remote connection limit on W2K3 DB servers. Discharged; terminal server client access licence services being installed to make this possible. ACTION: MAR to communicate with Eclipse about when removal of the Alpha server cosaxp6 is to take place. Discharged ACTION: RGM to action MCH to look at SIAP services for WFAU image data Discharged; a discussion between MAR, RGM and MCH resulted in it being thought that SSS or 6dF implementations being too different to anything that might be required for WSA in the future; however MCH is reviewing some work done previously (some time ago in fact). This issue will be revisited at a later date. Actions partly discharged but continuing: ----------------------------------------- ACTION: NCH to add documentation & views on image classification and associated sample selection. Continues; new Views have been defined, but documentation has to be included. ACTION: MAR & RSC to assemble an advertisement-feature poster concerning the WSA for ADASS. Continues; MAR has dug out the old poster. ACTION: JDT and MAR to continue sorting out AG access option functionality for saving WSA results to "MySpace". Continues; see Astrogrid deployment below. Actions carried forward from 19/08/05 meeting: ---------------------------------------------- ACTION: NCH to investigate the usefulness of a NAS solution for medium term archive mass storage. Continues; NCH noted that he had mentioned this to MJI at CASU in the week. CASU's solution to the mass storage problem is currently identical to WFAU's (i.e. P4 servers with 3Ware RAID controllers employing SATA 400 GB disks, all mounted in 16 to 24-bay chassis). Specific points and new actions: -------------------------------- Project management: Several things of note this week: Data Mining Applications support scientist interview will now take place on 23rd Sept; shortlist now consists of 3 (1 will be interviewed by phone). There is a VEGA-GAIA meeting in Cambridge on Monday 5th; NCH, PMW and AL will attend. VDUC takes place on the 6th in Cambridge; NCH, PMW, AL, JMS and JPE will attend (thanks to PMW for preparing the various documents requested for this meeting). The VDMT is scheduled for the same day, but the rather heavy VDUC agenda means this is unlikely to happen. In any case, PMW will prepare the usual update reports for this meeting. WFCAM update: See the stop press pages linked from the TWiki for latest news; WFCAM is back on the telescope and churning out more data. Major good news is that there has been a substantial improvement in image quality, amongst several other things. Comments and issues arising from CASU fortnightly minutes: The team noted the minuts of the meeting of 30/08/05; there were no comments. Networking: ACD, Colin Greenwood and Peter Clarke from NeSC arrived after this meeting for a technical discussion on possible UKLight networking experiments. NCH will put some notes on the internal TWiki concerning the results of this meeting. Finally, a revised example catalogue from CASU is being checked against the revised database schemas and ingest codes for any bugs. Hardware: All hardware still functioning normally. Hardware moves from C1 have been completed without any problems relevant to the science archive hardware. AL noted that there is a new SRIF-funded initiative within the University to implement a new, centralised major computing/storage resource (known as "cluster" at this stage?). Software: NCH has been occupied mainly with VEGA-GAIA things as opposed to VEGA-VDFS things, so not much progress to report except newly defined Views for sample selection based on image classification. MAR continues to work on the batch thumbnail interface functionality; ETWS is testing the new CASU FITS catalogues; NJC has been working on calibration merged source codes. RSC has been doing some rapid prototyping of the Declination plane-sweep algorithm for super fast source association. Initial tests look promising: of order 10s to take a catalogue of 100,000 sources and produce a dataset of order one million neighbours (this all done without optimised binary IO, so final benchmarks should be substantially better). Results have been compared against the existing SQL tables of neighbours, and are identical. Data Release: Pending; awaiting retransfer & reingest of SV1 & 2 data. SSA: Nothing new this week Astrogrid deployment: Nothing new this week. Miscellaneous: Nothing else this week.