| THE ING NEWSLETTER | No. 4, March 2001 |
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THE ING WIDE FIELD IMAGING SURVEY | SCIENCE |
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| Previous: | The ING High-Quality CCD Image Collection | Up: | Table of Contents | Next: | Bug in AF2/WYFFOS Reduction Software |
News from the Computing Facilities Group
Don Carlos Abrams (Head of Computing, ING)
In October of 2000, Pioneer launched the internal DVD-R drives for the DRM7000, the jukebox used by many research and commercial establishments including the ING. The new drives are compliant with the long awaited Book 2 Media and provide a key element for our proposed DVD library.
After many long months of hardware and software related issues the first Book 2 DVD was written automatically using the software developed in-house by the CFG. The system had been running for several days and was configured to archive data from the INT, unfortunately IDS was in use and thus did not produce sufficient data to allow us to write a complete DVD.
However, on the night of the 18th
of January the Wide Field Camera came into play for the first time since
the new archive had been running. It wasn't long before sufficient data
had been acquired and the DVD library sprang into action having collated
more than 4.7 Gb of data. We have been waiting for this day for many months
and it was certainly worth waiting for. So, we are now in a position to
be able to write observational data to DVDs for the INT.
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| The new DVD-R jukeboxes in the WHT computer room. [ JPEG | TIFF ] |
What's next? Well, these are still very early days, we need to incorporate data from the WHT and the JKT and just as importantly we need to work very closely with the Astronomy Group to ensure that reduced data, produced by the Beowulf System (http://www.ing.iac.es/~astrosw/InstSoft/wfcred/quicklook.html), are archived in a similar fashion.
The DRM 7000 towers connected to a Sun Microsystems Ultra 10 with two Hewlett Packard 6-slot external DAT loaders will form the core of the ING's data management system. The development of a new archiving strategy, involving DVD technology, has provided the CFG with an opportunity to re-examine the life cycle of our observational data. This has led to a number of improvements in the way images are handled. One such improvement has been the successful installation of an automated D-tape creation system, relieving the astronomer of the burden of having to create D-tapes. The D-tape creation process is now tightly bounded with the DVD archive, providing better data security and an easier image tracking system which will be made available for general use.
On another topic, the hardware
required for the installation of our first Beowulf System was recently
delivered, installed and configured. The equipment is now located in the
INT Clip Centre and is currently being tested and prepared by the Astronomy
Group. Initial results are very encouraging and a recent visit by Jim Lewis,
from the CASU (http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/~mike/casu/),
proved to be fruitful and enlightening in our quest for the provision of
reduced data.
Email contact: Don Carlos Abrams (don@ing.iac.es)
| Previous: | The ING High-Quality CCD Image Collection | Up: | Table of Contents | Next: | Bug in AF2/WYFFOS Reduction Software |
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