DM Monthly Status Report for April 2018

The DM monthly status report covering April activities has been posted in Docushare, Collection-6145. For your convenience, the High-level Summary is pasted below. Direct link to full report (pdf): http://ls.st/gd8.

High-level Summary

DM Project Management worked this month on the plans for transitioning staff from the construction project, through commissioning, and into operations. We also supported the Education and Public Outreach subsystem in both its Joint Technical Meeting and in a Citizen Science workshop, including members of the Zooinverse project. Both meetings provided useful feedback on interfaces and expectations.

The DM System Science Team initiated a change request to update DM requirements to support special observing programs in preparation for a call for proposals to be released this summer.

The System Architecture team coordinated writing an SPIE paper on DM processes and tooling. They also completed work on LSE-72, describing the interface between DM and the observatory control system. In addition, initial code to generate test reports from Jira with Adaptavist Test Management was created.

The prototype Notebook Aspect of the Science Platform is now deployed at the LDF Kubernetes Commons. We are able to create notebooks with contents pre-generated from a template based on user input, which is a key integration milestone for the interface between the Notebook and Portal aspects of the Science Platform. The Science User Interface now has more flexible HiPS support, including grid level and field of view display improvement as well as caching to improve performance. There have been some ergonomic improvements such as better dialog control and better error messages for misformatted position input.

Work on the new, “generation 3 Butler” data access abstraction and associated middleware continued through this month. A particular highlight was the development of tools to convert previous-generation data repositories to work with the new system.

The Science Pipelines saw the addition of upgraded astrometric capabilities to the Jointcal framework, together with a proof-of-concept alert filtering system and the ability to generation Brighter-Fatter correction kernels. These were combined with the start of regular QA analysis of prototype alert production pipeline runs, and substantial performance improvements to the deblender.

The Data Facility hosted and participated in another successful Early Integration Activity focused on simulated control and image collection for the nominal Auxiliary Telescope visit sequence.
Installation of the Base Authentication and Authorization system in Chile was completed. This system will provide authorization and authentication services to the Base site and security monitoring for network traffic between the Base and external locations.

In the Summit Computer Room the cooling, power, and dust remained stable and the first row of leaf switches were successfully installed. In the summit common areas (offices, conference rooms), cables for phones and networks have been installed (except in the central area where the cubicles require power and furniture to be installed first). A temporary voice and data network for summit staff was set up using the AURA microwave system. Once the core network is configured in Summit Computer Room, this network will be upgraded so that traffic flows over the new fibers.