From nch@roe.ac.uk Fri Jun 10 17:20:23 2011 Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2011 17:00:09 +0100 From: Nigel Hambly To: WFCAM Science Archive Team -- Eckhard Sutorius , Mike Read , Mark Holliman , Nigel Hambly , Nicholas Cross , Rob Blake , Ross Collins Cc: CCs for WSA weekly meeting minutes distribution -- Andrew Lawrence , Jim Emerson , "Noddle, Keith -- Keith Noddle" , Keith Noddle , Lorenzo Rimoldini , Mike Irwin , Bob Mann , Stephen Warren , Tom Kerr Subject: WFAU Science Archive occasional project meeting mins 10/6/11 Minutes of WFAU VDFS Science Archive meeting: June 10th 2011 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Present: NCH, ETWS, MAR, MSH, RGM, RSC, RPB Apologies: JPE, AL, MSH, KTN, NJC DoNM: Friday June 24th 2011 in the Vista Hut Actions discharged this week: ----------------------------- ACTION: NCH to draft messages to the VISTA PIs concerning the next steps in public survey DB provision and all to comment. Discharged (reactions will be, no doubt, most entertaining ...) ACTION: MAR to start a TWiki topic to track "stuff to do" in the final UKIDSS data releases. Discharged ACTION: MAR to nudge UKIDSS SHs on Semester 10B eyeball QC. Discharged; see Survey Release below for updates Actions partly discharged but continuing: ----------------------------------------- ACTION: MSH to set up ramses10 in the cluster rack and configure as a further ingest DB server. Nearly done: all system installations done; user DB copies are in transit Actions carried forward from 27/05/11 meeting --------------------------------------------- ACTION: RPB to look into automated RAID monitoring across all servers. Continues; ramses9 (most recent SW installation) has such a facility; it was noted that on the linux side monitoring is working as normal. Specific points and new actions: -------------------------------- Project management: Nothing of note this week. WFCAM & VISTA updates: Interesting debrief from the UKIRT Board was sent around earlier in the week by AL. Plans for WFCAM surveys in the 2012/2013 period are being looked at, with no clear outcome at present. However it seems that a "final" UKIDSS release may be required on this kind of timescale. Comments and issues arising from CASU minutes: The team noted the minutes of the meeting of 25th May, and were glad to see the issue of broken catalogues is being taken so seriously (doesn't half cause trouble at this end...). (have you noticed our minutes getting shorter as well? The words "losing" and "will to live" spring to mind...) Networking: Nothing of note this week. WSA/VSA Operations: RPB reported: "P86 data now fully ingested with the exception of VVV data and one broken night in the VMC (CASU have been alerted and are working on a repair). Problems with VVV data persist. It seems that CASU have now fixed all the files that were highlighted to them earlier by ETWS, though we are having problems copying them up here and getting the old files correctly deprecated in the VSA. After consultation with Phil and Dante, we've decided to press on regardless and release as much VVV data as we can now, then go back and fix the existing problems in time for the second release. Similar pragmatism will probably apply for the VHS v1.1 release, ignoring the broken file in P85 for now and releasing everything else so that RGM can sort out his ESO release. Whilst all this has been going on, we've cracked on with a release of P85 data for the VMC. 144 stacks have been created, and 24 tiles are in the process of being created (should finish tonight). Hopefully, when this is done, we can add on the P86 data without too much extra effort and, fingers crossed, CASU will have fixed the aforementioned broken file by that stage." Hardware and Systems: MSH updated the team on the latest hardware developments: a new web server ("djer") is up and running; a new 32 core 32GB mem processing server ("sahure") is now available for exclusive VDFS processing; for completeness, a new Gaia testbed server ("kakai") is set up; and the ramses10 cluster DB server node is installed and being set up with copies of SDSS DR7 and UKIDSS DR5 for some R&D with an MSc student. All these are infiniband connected; the internal TWiki pages have been updated with the details. There was some discussion about the latest developments in solid-state storage. Apparently the current state-of-the-art is 40 MByte/s transfer speed (very low power dissipation and footprint of course) for approximately 3x the cost of conventional HDs. We should keep an eye on this. Software: RSC reported further progress with the proper motion code implementation for the WSA. RSC noted that the as-hoc Python mirroring/synchronising script for the flat file mirrors WFCAM/VISTAPROPRIETY [sic] should be retired in favour of server-side implementations within the DBs themselves making use of MS SQL "replication" features to automatically do the updates. ACTION: RPB to set up mirror/sync for flat file DBs using MS SQL replication. Survey Data Release: As noted above, MAR has nudged the UKIDSS survey heads concerning eyeball QC for DR9. The deadline has been set for the end of July, and WFAU therefore has plans to make a UKIDSS DR9 release incorporating the LAS, DXS and GCS sometime in August. Non-survey Data Release: No news this time. Astrogrid deployment & Data Analysis services: No news this time. Miscellaneous: Nothing else to report this time. ============================================================= Nigel Hambly Tel: +44-131-668-8234 Institute for Astronomy Fax: +44-131-668-8416 School of Physics and Astronomy University of Edinburgh Email: nch@roe.ac.uk Royal Observatory Blackford Hill Edinburgh EH9 3HJ The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336. ============================================================= -- Scanned by iCritical.