DM Monthly Status Report for September 2017

The DM monthly status report covering September activities has been posted in Docushare, Collection-5185. For your convenience, the High-level Summary is pasted below. Direct link to full report (pdf): http://ls.st/hu0.

High-level Summary

DM successfully completed the Joint Status Review during the week of Sept 4 in Tucson. DM status was also presented to the Aura Management Council for LSST the following week.

Following discussion at the LSST2017 Project & Community Workshop, we are investigating retaining all raw images on disk. In support of this, a working group to study lossy compression of image data has been convened with Robert Gruendl (NCSA) as chair, and we are exploring the possibility of sharing images with the EPO subsystem. Successful completion of these actions will address issues surrounding poor user experience when accessing images.

The DM Science group completed a draft report on requirements and the status of the implementation of DM systems needed for special programs was prepared, uncovering a number of potential gaps and areas where DM’s designs and plans need to be refined. Addressing these issues will continue to be a major focus through November.

The Architecture team overhauled the DM build system, which is now completely based Python 3.6, with the last components which require Python 2 having been removed.
Automatic Python standards checking has also been included in the development process.

The JupyterLab-based environment, which forms part of the Science Platform, was deployed on a test Kubernetes cluster at NCSA and integrated with the Data Facility authentication system (“CI logon”).

The Qserv database system was upgraded to support disconnected/asynchronous queries, including query submission, monitoring, result retrieval, cancellation.

The Science Pipelines group completed initial benchmarks of the proposed alert distribution system, demonstrating its basic capability to scale to operational levels, and published technical note DMTN-061, describing the current state-of-the-art in terms of image differencing within the DM codebase. Further, new algorithm that more efficiently and effectively rejects artefacts when creating coadds has been made available in the Stack. This algorithm is still undergoing detailed validation at the time of writing.

The Summit Facility and Summit Computer Room will not be available until end of October and full occupancy not until the end of the year. Planning of the network ducts and power in the computer room and cable trays in the Telescope building is being finalized. At the advice of the LSST Architect, in order to secure site occupancy from Besalco as soon as possible, these elements will be installed by another contractor after Besalco has granted full occupancy.

The bulk of the REUNA DWDM (Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing) and AURA DWDM equipment was received. We will do First Optical Light demonstrations of >40Gb bandwidth from La Serena to NCSA in October, and from Cerro Pachon to NCSA in December.