DM Monthly Status Report for March 2018

The DM Monthly status report covering March 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/20n.

High-level Summary:

A highly productive DM “all hands” meeting was held in conjunction with the Systems Engineering group at IPAC during the week of March 5. A total of 90 people attended. A major focus of the meeting was to review the existing QA tooling available within DM and to make plans for its continued development. In conjunction with this, the DM System Science Team having been planning science validation activities and have begun compiling a list of the datasets that will be required. The meeting also addressed outstanding interface control documents (ICDs), and, in particular, development a consensus around LSE-72, the interface between the Observatory Control System (OCS) and DM which is being implemented on LCR-1006. This month also saw updates to LSE-61, the DM Subsystem Requirements, being baselined, and revisions to LSE-75, the ICD between DM and the Telescope Control System (TCS) being submitted to the Change Control Board. Continuing a theme of updates to DM documentation, the Developer Guide was substantially reorganized for clarity and convenience, and user-facing documentation was released for the new “Scarlet” deblender.

Outside the team meeting, substantial progress was made across the DM development effort. Highlights include substantial improvements to the display of HiPS data within the Firefly tool, including a HEALPix grid overlay, facilities to select which servers are used to download images, and better error messages and tooltips.

The Jointcal system for fitting astrometric and photometric solutions to data from multiple visits simultaneously achieved a major milestone, with successful astrometric fits to data from Hyper Suprime-Cam. This month also saw upgrades to the prototype Alert Production pipeline, including crosstalk correction being applied to the DECam data which is being used for prototyping, and the successful completion of tests designed to demonstrate that the Apache Kafka technology is scalable to the demands of LSST’s alert distribution system.

Further improvements were made to the Prompt Processing Database (PPDB) prototype based on discussions at the all hands meeting, including direct read/write support for standard LSST data storage mechanisms, SQLite support, and more flexible spatial indexing. The Kubernetes Commons environment at NCSA was released for early user testing. LSST’s Git Large File Storage system is now deployed using Kubernetes.

On March 8th, the 100 Gbps link between Miami and Santiago was successfully activated after replacing the faulty line card in one of the SDN switches (AndesLight1) in Santiago. In addition, a new 100 Gbps line card was added to the other SDN switch (AndesLight2) in Santiago to provide redundancy in the future. Test results have shown that both 100 Gbps links were stable and performing as expected. Data transfers between Miami and Santiago were sustained at 30 Gbps.