Teraminutes for the meeting of Friday, Dec. 17 2004

Present: Anthony, Mireille, Emmanuel, Fred, Gilles, Jean-Christophe, Yannick

Absent: Henry, Gerard

- Skywatcher: The VOtable library is now working. Can parse requests to JC's database. (Note: for information, the data bases used at Terapix are: DBskywatcher, DBTerapix, DBphotometric, DBproblem, and DBspica).

Mireille made some tests on skywatcher:

- Reload: contrary to what was believed, the reload must still be activated to get views of the selection. According to JC, the problem is due to the PNG image creation which may can sometimes take too long. Anthony suggests JC create the image in a fork process, so that the main program will only continue once the image is created.

- RA-DEC units: first view of the field is in decimal RA-DEC but switch to hh:mm:ss and deg ' " after zooming. JC explained the resolution of the first un-zoomed view is too low and does not allow users to read detailed coordinates. Having hh:mm:ss and deg ' " is only useful in zoom mode.

- The RA-DEC labels are not visible in the CAR projection. This is a window effect: the plot size should be smaller than the window size so that the labels that are written outside the sky limits will be visible in the window.

- The projection acronyms are not defined.

- The pdf skywatcher file report does not explain the meaning of the center RA-DEC.

- It would be useful to have a save option per filter to provide the user a filelist in each filter.

- Spica: Images are all transferred to the cluster disks. The few remaining bugs fixed, but the DBterapix initialisation still remains a lengthly and non-user friendly task. Gerard should provide a more efficient and well documented tool that handles the initialisation in a simple way.

Mix2 crashed immediately after Qfits started. Laurent will therefore run Qfits on mix3 and pix nodes as soon as possible. Fred will try to fix the problem on mix2: 2 options.

- Change setting of the linux kernel on mix2 to check whether the PAN-STARRS settings woks on mix2.

- Change the mix2 mother board, if setting options failed.

- Power supply problems: Christophe Gobet proposed Terapix switch to the present-MAGIC2 power supply next Friday. According to Christophe we should be able to switch very quicky, so we expect there will be no impact on T0002. The new cable that will feed the UPS should be ready in advance, so that the UPS will be disconnected only during a few seconds. Laurent can therefore run Qfits on an unlimited list of files.

- UPS: the present setting parameters permits to provide power supply during one minute before a shutdown process is initiated on cosmix and cos[1-4] nodes. Then power supply is only provided during one minute. This is too short: new settings should be : shutdown operation after 5 minutes and stop power supply by UPS after 10 minutes. Fred and Gilles will also install tools on mix2 and mix3 to handle clean shutdown process by UPS in case of power failure.

- Scamp: Emmanuel will try to fix all bugs detected by Laurent this week end. Emmanuel ask Laurent to save bug reports in case of failure by SCAMP in order to assist bug detection and fixing.

 Still need for a local USNO-B catalogue to avoid requests to CDS which is too sensitive to network problems or CDS maintenance activities.

 Mireille reported that Scamp does not provide the same result when Scamp handles together a data set covering two uncorrelated area (2 groups with very large separation in the sky) and when it handles them separately (2 Scamp runs).

 Mireille reported that no external astrometric plots are provided when Scamp run on one signle image, though a solution is found.

- DBTerapix: progress is too slow. There are serious concerns that nothing will be ready before Gerard leaves. The Panier is not yet provided. Urgent delete tasks requested last week not provided. No documentation ready. Urgent discussion between Gerard, Laurent and Yannick needed. Should be prioritised next Monday (dec. 20).

- Backup/Archive: One backup of "releaseCADC_20041105" done on USB2 disk (176 GB). Another one needed to complete the archiving process. Mapix disks not all backed up yet, but is in progress. Gilles should keep all of us more informed on the save/archiving progress. FTP-terapix still need to be backuped (750 GB).

- Defectix: Anthony still working on it. Demo will be done next Thursday. Anthony has almost finished the image-stamps tool for EFIGI. Emmanuel suggest Anthony use Lanczos-n instead of nearest neighbor interpolation function in order to produce more beautiful and better sampled images.

Next meeting: Thursday Dec. 23.