DM Monthly Status Report for March 2017

The DM monthly status report covering March has been posted in Docushare, Collection-5185. For your convenience I am pasting high-level and summary and project status below. Direct link to full report (pdf): http://ls.st/0c2.

High-level Summary

There was good attendance at the Joint Technical Meeting in Pasadena March 6-8th. This included the first presentation by William O’Mullane (WOM) to the DM assembly on the direction of DM.
At JTM a discussion on the first Camera raft data was held and post JTM a module for the camera has been created to load this data in the LSST stack.
Also at JTM the Prototype Data Access Centre (PDAC) hosted at NCSA was shown off to much acclaim. Work continues to further refine the PDAC especially in the area of the Science Platform. This will allow some scientific validation of the platform.
Work continues on dealing with the heterogeneous focal plane. The “Photometric Redshifts with the LSST: Evaluating Survey Observing Strategies with a New Nearest-Neighbors Estimator” (Graham et al.) manuscript is ready and awaiting the publication board process.

Project Status

Wil O’Mullane stayed on after JTM with Krabbendam to visit IPAC and discuss detail planning and scope, this was a good session clarifying roles and guidelines for IPAC helping to get costs under control.
The initial work on the camera module starts work on the code needed for the commissioning camera and should help define this interface for DM.

Selected technical accomplishments:

  • The Architecture Team contributed, through activities at the Joint Technical Meeting and subsequent meetings and writings, to defining interfaces, system components, and verification activities. In addition, the infrastructure for writing and publishing LaTeX-based DM documents was substantially enhanced.
  • The AP Team
    • Implemented a significantly improved matching algorithm for single chip to reference catalog.
    • Significant progress in the area of Wcs, XYTransform and coordinate transforms in general.
    • Plugged jointcal into the SQuaRE validation system.
  • The DRP Team
    • Completed transitioning the technology used to interface C++ code with Python in the DM Stack from Swig to pybind11. This new system is simpler, more flexible, and easier to maintain: it represents a major step forward in the usability of our codebase.
    • Investigated and resolved a major regression in weak lensing science measurements, representing a major success for our QA efforts.
    • Completed the first fully functional prototype of the “donut” fitting pipeline. This enables us to measure the wavefront, and hence estimate the PSF, across the focal plane.
  • The SUIT Team
    • Deployed a new version of PDAC at NCSA with updated time series function.
    • Prototyped Jupyter notebook and Firefly server connection to JupyterHub using PDAC, running LSST stack to do forced photometry calculation.
  • The DAX Team
    • Continued support of integration activities at the PDAC via problem investigations and bug fixes.
    • Completed a significant refactor of the Data Butler camera mapper so that it no longer accesses repository data by making filesystem calls directly.
  • The Net&BS Team
    • La Serena - Santiago Fiber: REUNA delivered the report that documents the completion of the long haul fiber with the measurements of length and attenuation of the fiber in each segment. These measures were sent to Coriant, for them to verify the equipment design, and the result was positive. It is relevant to note that as the fiber is brand new the attenuation parameters are of a very good quality, less than the theoretical parameters.
    • DWDM Equipment: The AURA requisition went out to Coriant for the DWDM equipment. Expect arrival of the equipment at the end of May, when we will have 30 days to inspect the equipment before payment. REUNA sent the formal announcement to Coriant, stating they are the awarded solution.
    • FIU CIARA hosted the first monthly meeting of the LSST Network Engineering Team (NET), which is the cross-institution team of network management and technical staff responsible for designing, engineering, deployment, and supporting operations of the LSST long-haul networks.
  • The NCSA Team
    • Thirteen NCSA project team members attended the 2017 Joint Technical Meeting in Glendale, California.
    • Members of the Process Middleware team met with developers from USC to discuss use of the Pegasus workflow management system for LSST Batch Production Services.
    • We completed the Operations Plan (LPM-181) for the LSST Data Facility elements.
  • The SQuaRE Team
    • Made a major SQuaSH release into production.
    • Set up a binary distribution server and is beta-testing it.
    • Completed the 13.0 release activities.