From nch@roe.ac.uk Fri Jul 14 17:44:18 2006 Date: Fri, 7 Jul 2006 15:59:14 +0100 (BST) From: Nigel Hambly To: WFCAM Science Archive Team -- Eckhard Sutorius , Johann Bryant , 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 , Mike Irwin , Mark Holliman , Peredur Williams , Stephen Warren Subject: WFAU WSA weekly meeting minutes, 7th July 2006 Minutes of WFCAM Science Archive meeting: 7th July 2006 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Present: NCH, NJC, PMW, RSC, ETWS, MSH, JB, AL, RGM Apologies: JPE, MAR, JMS DONM: 10am, Friday 14th July 2006 Actions discharged this week: ----------------------------- ACTION: ETWS & NJC to unlink all UDS documentation and glossary entries pointing to CASU-extractor info Discharged; checked and tweaked by NCH & ETWS Actions partly discharged but continuing: ----------------------------------------- ACTION: RGM to investigate further any funding opportunities from elsewhere (i.e. AG and IfA) AL reported that the AG Cycle 4 plan includes HW provision, so there are grounds for optimism; AL suggested we approach JSD once the AG situation has become clearer (in a couple of weeks time) from the point of view of IfA cash. Actions carried forward from 30/06/06 meeting: ---------------------------------------------- ACTION: JB to review Hardware/OS/DBMS design doc to note areas that need updating and itemise new sections required - CONTINUES: Note that this is on hold until after DR1. Specific points and new actions: -------------------------------- Project management: PMW noted that a VDMT has been arranged for Monday 24th July at 2pm at ROE. The team filled in the progress chart for June; the Q3 plan would be finalised after DR1 release. WFCAM update: Nothing new to report this week Comments and issues arising from CASU fortnightly minutes: The team noted the minutes of the meeting of 28th June; there were no substantive comments. Networking: JB noted that the UKLight proposal for bandwidth has been given the all clear, and preparations at the KB end are proceeding. NCH recommended that we go ahead and make any required HW purchases asap to facilitate making the connection. WSA Operations: JB reported that the UKIDSS shallow surveys are all ready for release since the GPS source merging and neighbour matching was complete earlier in the week and the DB indexing procedure has been run. A backup of the main database was made overnight on Wednesday to secure the work of the last few weeks. JB also reported that a new monitoring script has been set up to run as a cron job on khufu. Hardware: Archive server reboot after the power outage of 1st July proceeded without a hitch. NCH noted that another heat overload situation occurred on Thursday 6th due to an unusually warm day coupled with failure of two aircon units in C1. Toujours la meme f***ing chose. NCH noted that offers of cash to premises to help buy new air conditioning units have been made; PMW noted that it seems to be logistics rather than anything else that is holding up a more permanent solution to the problem. NCH noted that even if we do acquire more aircon, we'd probably overload the 13amp extension lead that evidently supplies power to the entire site ... MSH reported communications with EPCC concerning the large storage SAN. NCH asked him to update the TWiki pages with all relevant information. NCH raised the issue of 64-bit linux on the 64-bit file server khafre. MSH has installed 64-bit open-SUSY on a VOTech server, and NCH floated the idea of MSH supporting khafre as opposed to IT Support... but we will revist after DR1. Software: NCH reported: more release preparations (CU19), fixes for source merging software (CU7), addition of some useful user-defined functions to the DB from SkyServer, and a little progress on the WSA paper. ETWS reported: "Finished software installation on khafre and upgraded most of the software to the latest version, but still some tests are needed. Updated schema parser for the production of DR1 webpages. Updated documentation of the DXS schema file due to the usage of S-Extractor." RSC reported: "I've regained some momentum in documenting the software. A list of the software modules that I have completed a review of is kept on the TWiki here: http://apache.roe.ac.uk/twiki/bin/view/Main/RossDocumentation NB: The updated code documentation only exists in the development branch of CVS. I'm also keeping the TWiki software documentation notes up to date here: http://apache.roe.ac.uk/twiki/bin/view/WSA/SoftwareNotes, including a new TWiki document for the CSV module I wrote this week." NJC has been working flat-out on getting the DXS and UDS data into the archive (see below). Survey Data Release: As noted above, the shallow surveys are ready to go, one week ahead of the (original) release date. The DXS and the UDS are not ready to go, for reasons entirely outwith the control of WFAU. UDS: our Nottingham colleagues have been working hard over the last two weeks to get a hugely improved mosaic ready for DR1. A few (almost inevitable) last-minute hitches have resulted in a delay in the delivery of these final products, originally scheduled for delivery to the archive on June 30th. The improvement over the "baseline" stack is so much that NCH accepted a delay in the delivery. Omar & Seb now want to delay the DR1 release by one week in order to have time to check what they have done. DXS: despite heroic efforts from NJC to get the CASU software to optimally source extract these stacks, we are still having problems. The version of the code supplied by JRL (including the sky variance estimator bug fix) did not work, and an attempt to get around the limitation in the old version by scaling the ADUs away from unit variance seems to have screwed up the image classifier for some bizarre reason. If it was not for these problems, the DXS would have been ready today along with the shallow surveys. Once again, a delay to the release date is really required to sort out these problems. Several ideas, including using S-Extractor for the DXS were floated; in the end the team decided to continue with the efforts to get the CASU code to do the right thing. So: the team (including AL) discussed a delay of 1 week to the original 14th July release date, and all accepted that this was sensible. The new release date will be 21st July. Any complaints, please email to someoneWhoGivesADamn@last.week.or.so Non-survey Data Release: No time even to finish typ Astrogrid deployment: Ditt Miscellaneous: Nothing else this week.