Minutes for the Terameeting of 17th August 2004. Present: Gilles, Yannick, Emmanuel, JC, Laurent, Fred, Henry

DotProject groupware demonstration (Yannick):

Yannick demonstrates the dotproject groupware package installed by Fred. It allows to manage the distribution of tasks and also allows the generation of tickets. This package is accessible from this link: dotproject/ . Tickets are for more urgent, short term jobs, which are urgent or are show-stoppers. There is also the calendar package, which provides the same functionality as the previous calendar package. This package will be used in place of the previous one. Everyone MUST use it and start filling out tasks.

Spica (Laurent, Yannick):

300 tasks were prepared for Spica processing before Laurent left on vacation. 100 or so of tasks of these tasks were started by Yannick.

 Several problems were noted. In many cases, astrometrix fails with doubled sources visible in the final stacks -- the offsets are incorrectly calculated for the last image, and the global solution fails. But when Henry processed a test case of five of these images, he had no problem. The only difference in two cases is that Laurent supplies the full path: this seems to produce problems for Astrometrix.

 The second problem is for stacked images produced by Spica is where the gaps between the CCDs are still visible -- this is perhaps due to incorrect weight map files.

 Yannick would also like to have a zoom of the final stacked image fits, a sub-image of 2000x2000 because currently it is hard distinguish details on the stacked images, both in png and fits format (fits format images would be useful for displaying in an external window).

 Fred has to implement the PSF evaluation sampled on stacked images over 10'x10' boxes.

 Fred will implement the image autocorellation in order to have a detailled image evaluation that checks systematics generated by the astrometry+swarping+stacking prcesses.

 Need to calculate the amount of disk space required for a Spica run

Integration of Scamp in Spica

 Yannick would like for the pipeline to switch to Scamp as soon as possible.
 Laurent needs just to parse the XML output of Scamp and integrate the PNG files.
 Yannick underlies the considerable time gain in using Scamp. 300 ldac files can be processed in a few hours (which would take several hours with astrometrix.)
 Henry is not convinced yet that the quality of the astrometric solution from Scamp is comparable to astrometrix, but agrees that astrometrix is too slow, and moreover that the data products produced by astrometrix do not confirm to the interface document, and are not suitable for release.

Database backup

 Yannick would like to ensure that the procedure to restore the database is well described and can easily be implemented, i.e., can it be used by anyone in Terapix in case of crash when Laurent and Gerard are on vacations?

Scamp (Emmanuel)

Recent development
 Work in progress: log mode implemented
 Better calcuation of statistics
 Changing rejection sigma doesn't change things that much: suggests that the solution is pretty good
 Suggestion also that X_IMAGE, Y_IMAGE not used in future for Scamp: new method of object centrage will need to implemented in SExtractor, and quality fits needs to run again.
 Emmanuel need the file names of the images that produces bold warnings during the Scamp process.

Skywatcher (JC):

 Emmanuel suggests that we use XGA mode to make sure that all the skywatcher plot is visible.
 Web interface for demonstrated by Jean-Christophe
 Some problems with cache loading.
 JC will change the colour scheme to match Scamp.
 Yannick would also like Skywatcher to show the images stacked by SPICA.

Hardware (Emmanuel, Fred, Gilles)

 4 pro opteron has now arrived, and testing will begin shortly.
 2kw UPS (1200eur)
 baie FBC (8600eur). SCSI rack less expensive: currently FBC option from transtec more expensive (8800 eur).
 Gilles will order the UPS for the 4-pro and the fiberchannel disk rack.
 mix1/mix2 will be added to the cluster as soon as possible to provide more disk space to the pipeline

Other:

 Gilles will re-organise his office to provide more space for visitors.

Next tera-meeting: Friday August 20th 2004