DM Monthly Status Report for March 2019

The DM monthly status report covering March’s activities has been posted to DocuShare, collection-752. For convenience, the High-level Summary is pasted below. Direct link to the full report (pdf): http://ls.st/gpj

High-level Summary
Community Interactions, Meetings and Workshops
The DM Project Manager and Subsystem Scientist participated in the LSST Project Science
Team face-to-face meeting in Tucson. In addition, the DM Software Architect chaired, and
other members of DM team participated in, the Identify Management system (IDM) internal
review.
Technical Progress
The DM Science Team began preparing DM-related Operations Readiness Criteria as input
to the System AI&T and Commissioning Plan (LSE-79).
A number of important advances were made in the development of the LSST Science
Platform (LSP) this month. A highlight was the deployment of the first version of the IVOA1
SODA (Server Side Operations for Data Access) image server being at the LSST Data Facility.
The TAP (Table Access Protocol) query server was also extended to handle the CIRCLE,
POINT, and POLYGON regions in conjunction with the CONTAINS function. Meanwhile, the
TAP search user interface had a number of improvements for layout and in target input.
Finally, two key LSP authentication and authorization milestones were delivered,
demonstrating integration with the Notebook and API aspects.
A major new release, version 17.0, of the LSST Science Pipelines was made this month. This
version contains a wide variety of new features, bug fixes, and improvements,
incorporating many of the new developments that have been reported over the last several
months and making them available to the science user. The release was accompanied by
the publication of DMTR-131, a characterization report describing its scientific
performance, and was rapidly followed by the minor 17.0.1 patch release addressing some
last-minute issues.
New feature development in the Science Pipelines continued apace. Of particular note is
that the Alert Production system now calculates an initial set of time-series characterization
features for DIAObjects, and a continued push to understand the
on our approach to mitigating differential chromatic refraction. The Pipelines team have
also been collaborating with members of the Dark Energy Science Collaboration on
understanding how best to apply LSST software to processing DESC Data Challenge 2 data.
Work continues on the new “Generation 3” middleware which will be required to deploy the
LSST Pipelines in the operational era. Notably, during March a version of the “Data Butler”
was demonstrated running with an Oracle database backend. This is an important step
towards being able to deploy this software at scale in the LSST Data Facility.
Some significant steps forward were taken this month in terms of integrating the Data
Facility at NCSA with the wider LSST infrastructure. These included initial tests of job
submission from NCSA to computational resources at CC-IN2P3, including testing of file
transfer methods for output datasets. Further, a prototype system to transfer data
collected by the AuxTel system in Tucson to the Data Facility at NCSA was put in place.
Finally, the L1 Test Stand at NCSA, using the same code base as the Auxiliary Telescope
spectrograph system running on the test stand in Tucson, is fully functional.
The authorization and authentication systems were configured at NCSA and sent through
Tucson to the Summit where they will be installed by local staff in April/May. CIENA has
delivered most of the Dense Wave Division Multiplex (DWDM) equipment for the Santiago
Boca Raton link, with completion expected during April. Work continued on the campus
and control wired and Wi-Fi networks to all areas of the Summit Facility. The All-Sky Camera
switches are mounted and wired by the electrical team.