From nch@roe.ac.uk Fri Sep 9 15:12:51 2005 Date: Fri, 9 Sep 2005 11:47:29 +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 meeting minutes: 9 September 2005 Minutes of WFCAM Science Archive meeting: 9th September 2005 ------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------- Present: NCH, MAR, RSC, NJC, PMW, ETWS, JDT Apologies: MCH, RGM, JPE, JMS, AL DONM: 10am, Friday 16th September 2005, plate library Actions discharged: ------------------- ACTION: NCH to add documentation & views on image classification and associated sample selection. Discharged. Actions partly discharged but continuing: ----------------------------------------- ACTION: MAR & RSC to assemble an advertisement-feature poster concerning the WSA for ADASS. Continues; NCH suggested that RSC makes contact with Jason to make sure that timescales for printing are OK with him. 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 02/09/05 meeting: ---------------------------------------------- ACTION: NCH to investigate the usefulness of a NAS solution for medium term archive mass storage. - CONTINUES Specific points and new actions: -------------------------------- Project management: NCH and PMW reported back from VDUC/VDMT meetings on Wed/Thurs of this week. The only issue of real concern is the timescale for data releases. There is an action on VDFS to do an ESO-wide release of UKIDSS data before the beginning of the new year (Jan '06). There was also some concern over the release in reprocessed and/or new data from 05A amongst one UKIDSS member of VDUC who was not present at the SV kick-off meeting in Edinburgh. NCH and MJI both sympathised with this position, and MJI suggested that it would have been nice to get some feedback on new catalogue params, calibrations and the revised archive schema as soon as possible. NCH suggested at this meeting that we should in any case be looking at the retransfer/reingest of the latest pipeline products since so much has changed at both ends that small wrinkles are bound to crop up (see Networking below). 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 9/9/05 am. 5th Test Match Update: England 1st innings: 345 for 9 - not bad. Networking: ETWS expressed concern that despite new SV1 catalogue products being made available at CASU, the semaphore "transfer completed" files in the appropriate nightly directories have not been removed - hence the transfer tool is simply reporting that there are no new data to transfer. NCH suggested that we contact CASU with some urgency: ACTION: ETWS to email MR (mriello@ast.cam.ac.uk) and STH (sth@ast.cam.ac.uk), CCing to NCH and MJI, about the handshaking problems with reprocessed data. On a completely different note, NCH reported the very constructive meeting held with UKLight representatives from NeSC last Friday (a note has been put up on the TWiki with the details). However, after conversations with PSB at CASU, there is some concern over diverting staff resources to the not inconsiderable task of setting up an experimental link given all the other calls on the time of the individuals concerned, and the simple fact that we seem to be OK for bandwidth at the moment plus the feeling that SuperJANET-5 will be up and running by the time we need anything more. ETWS suggested we look at the transfer rates of the next batch of CASU-WFAU transfers to see how the bandwidth is holding up; in the meantime NCH will email PSB some info coming out of last week's meeting, and we'll see how things develop over the next month or so. ACTION: NCH to email PSB concerning UKLight. Hardware: PMW asked about the khufu situation, and reported that he is procuring a UPS for the system. NCH will put in a helpdesk to get the system configured as per sneferu. ACTION: NCH submit a helpdesk to get khufu set up. Software: RSC reported some rather poor benchmarks for the new source association implementation: currently testing on a billion row neighbour run, and still churning along after 24hr. The suspicion is that this may well be limited by NFS overheads; NCH suggested trying a run on local disks. MAR continues to work on the batch thumbnail extraction; NCH suggested that if an implementation is ready for test prior to the next SV meeting then we should ask a few UKIDSS SVers to check it out to see what they think. ETWS has been working on the transfer codes to work around some issues raised by reprocessed data; also has put major effort into the documentation parser. NCH has added in a bundle of info to check out the new features, and this all seems to work rather nicely. The new features will be available to the user community at the next release (it is felt that to update the web pages before the new release would only confuse users since there are so many changes at this stage). NJC has been concentrating mainly on personal research this past week; but plans to get back on to the allocated tasks now. Data Release: Pending; awaiting retransfer & reingest of SV1 & 2 data. Astrogrid deployment: JDT reported progress on the "MySpace" button functionality on the WSA web interface - now needs to liaise with MAR to deploy the solution he has come up with. Miscellaneous: Nothing else this week.