From nch@roe.ac.uk Fri May 31 17:06:13 2013 Date: Fri, 31 May 2013 15:56:31 +0100 From: Nigel Hambly To: Eckhard Sutorius , Nicholas Cross , Rob Blake , Ross Collins , Mike Read , Mark Holliman , Clive Davenhall Cc: Lorenzo Rimoldini , Bob Mann , Jim Emerson , Keith Noddle , Norman Gray , Stephen Warren , Tom Shanks , Simon Dye , Stelios Voutsinas , Tom Kerr , Mike Irwin , Andy Lawrence at ROE , Nigel Metcalfe , Maria-Rosa Cioni , Alastair Edge , James Dunlop , Matt Jarvis , Richard McMahon at IOA , Dante Minniti , Phil Lucas Subject: WFAU VDFS Science Archives project team meeting minutes, 31/5/2013 Present: RPB, RGM, NJC, RSC, NCH, MSH, ETWS Apologies: JPE, AL, STV, NG, KTN, MAR, ACD DoNM: 10am Friday June 14th 2013 in the Villas meeting room MAR in the chair (room is booked). Actions discharged this time: ----------------------------- ACTION: All to have a think about how to employ coverage maps to provide quantitative overlap information Continues; MSH noted that Aladin has this kind of functionality and that a software library should be come available once the IVOA has agreed on the metadata specifications. Actions partly discharged but continuing: ----------------------------------------- ACTION: NJC to check the standard crossmatching of non-survey PI programmes for inclusion of WISE (all) and SDSS-DR9 (WFCAM) Partially done. ACTION: MAR to have a go at releasing other VISTA PI DBs (e.g. for JPE) Continues; RPB noted that one has been created so far and awaits release to the PI. Actions carried forward from 17/05/2013 meeting ----------------------------------------------- ACTION: NJC to update VISTA auto-QC to deprecate C/D/R flagged frames Continues. ACTION: ETWS, with RPB, to develop an automated helper script to keep release DB files links updated. Continues; this one still has low priority. Specific points and new actions: -------------------------------- Project management: Clive Davenhall rejoins WFAU after a brief sojourn elsewhere in the university. NCH welcomed him back in absentia. NCH noted that Gaia CU9 is kicking-off with a meeting in Barcelona Mon/Tues next week, and that this will impact the staff profile; substantive effort for the GENIUS FP7 programme would be required from September. RGM noted that things are a little up in the air regarding likely commitments for the next grant period; the WFAU grant itself is still held up by the Programmatic Review which is expected to report in July. WFCAM, VISTA and VST updates: Nothing to report. Comments and issues arising from CASU minutes: No new minutes this time. Networking: ETWS noted that transfers and ingests of VISTA v1.3 data are steadily progressing. Transfers and JPG creation is up to mid-P87 and metadata ingests are done up to the end of P86. Network speeds are holding up well except when data are being written to disk 43 (the RAID formerly and infamously known as disk38 ... be afraid) when speeds drop to 10 MB/s (cf. CASU's previous minutes). ETWS noted that we're fast running out of space to store all the reprocessed data. WSA/VSA/OSA/GES Operations: ETWS created a new version of the OSA browser pages including the latest release, and has also updated the GES schema browser to be consistent with the latest internal, preliminary release DB that was made at the end of last week. The GES consortium is now getting organised into access communities to police proprietary access. RSC and ACD have been testing the GES DB, and noticed quite a lot of anomalous data ranges for certain attributes. Hardware and Systems: MSH noted that the new NAS box will be delivered next week, pre-formatted to our own specification so should be attached to the network quickly to relieve any congestion of data transfers. Survey Data Release: NJC and RPB have spent quite a lot of time fixing up some of the VISTA release DBs for small errors and inconsistencies noted as a result of feedback on ESO phase 3 deliverables. Rather worryingly, users have been spotting strange photometric and astrometric degradation in both VISTA and WFCAM reprocessed data in the latest releases compared to older versions in previous releases. Work is on-going in tracking down the source of the anomalies. Software: RSC reported: "After a brief stutter when ramses12 crashed, VVV CU16 completed and revealed good performance overall. VVV CU6 is now suffering from the same major performance slow-down that CU16 initially had by accessing the union view of the monthly-split detection tables, which unless fixed will make this, already slow, use case completely infeasible. The GES ingest script was updated to provide cross-matches between targets and the external catalogues. We had an interesting discussion with Malcolm Atkinson from Informatics about our upcoming short project to experiment with a Monet DB implementation of our VVV database. The main outcome was a desire to identify just one key query that we could focus on attempting to optimise. Any good ideas for this would be appreciated." There was some discussion regarding the last point; the generation of light-curve information in the VVV was cited as a possible candidate, although it was noted that optimising against a single specific use is rather simplistic. Non-survey Data Release: None since last time. Astrogrid deployment, VO & Data Analysis services: ETWS has created metadocs for some of the external database TAP services, and MSH has set up TAP services for the same. One of the catalogues is GALEX, and MSH noted that there seem to be a few empty tables in our version (GR6) while there is a more recent version available through STScI MAST. ACTION: NCH to enquire with MAST as to the status of GALEX GR6 & 7 and see if an exchange of SQL DBs is warranted. Miscellaneous: RGM noted that a summer student has just started work on comparing OSA photometry against SDSS in overlap regions. ADASS is to be held in Hawaii this year, and not surprisingly the number of volunteers to attend has increased significantly on previous years... ============================================================= 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.