Cycle-4 Technical Review

Management Summary

Cycle-4 was a very busy 6 month and we were involved in a wide variety of events in addition to our engineering commitments. These are detailed below. Despite being severely stretched, the majority of planned goals were met with only two exceptions of note - again, these are detailed below.

This cycle saw a sea-change in the way AstroGrid is perceived by fellow VO projects and potential users alike. As an example, we attended ADASS in good numbers, but were unable to sit in on many of the talks as we were in almost constant demand for unscheduled meetings. Similarly where before this cycle we were offering Science Workshops to various institues, now were are being asked to deliver them and we are having to schedule them carefully to avoid redirecting too many resouces into this area at the expense of sceince and engineering tasks and thus becoming the victims of our own success.

As a result of the successes in Cycle-4, we are now well placed to use the remaing two cycles to turn the AstroGrid project into an AstroGrid service.

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Contents

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Cycle-4 Technical Goals

Software Product

ID	Description	Status
C4-01	Complete external component review	Done
C4-02	Agree key standards at Moscow IVOA	Done
C4-03	Single point failure review	Not started (1)
C4-04	New cross-match functionality	On-going (2)
C4-05	New component admin and config methods	Not started (3)
C4-06	Review and improve component performance	On-going
C4-07	VOTECH Data Exploration Study report (VOTECH)	Done

Science Services

ID	Description	Status
C4-08	ADQL service to UKIDSS, SDSS, 2MASS	Done
C4-13	Deliver programmes from Science Tools Call No. 1	Done

Community

ID	Description	Status
C4-14	Demo at IAU General Assembly, Prague	Done
C4-15	Set VOTECH Stage-4 goals	Done
C4-16	Developer/Data Centre Workshop(s)	Not started (4)
C4-17	Complete web page re-factoring	Done
C4-18	Further Science Workshop(s)	Done
C4-19	VOTECH revised project plan	Done
C4-20	Deployed system release 2006.4	Not done (5)

Notes

1	Although planned for Cycle-4, due to staffing issues, this task was not started. It is however vitally important that we understand and eliminate any single points of failure within the deployed services. Thus this task will have high priority in Cycle-5.

2

There is no single solution to the problem of cross matching data from various sources. We are working with the OGSA-DAI team in Edinburgh to develop a robust, general purpose solution to the problem of how to move results in an efficient manner to facilitate the execution of the cross matching algorithm as chosen by the astronomer. This is on-going work for Cycles-5 and 6. We also expect to work on alternative solutions to the cross matching problem using existing deployed components.

3	As with C4-03, staff issues prevented this task being started. Although not time critical, we will be undertaking this work with increased priority in Cycle-5.

4

It was agreed with the AG-DAG that Technical Workshops should be delivered on a scale smaller than the successful but very resource-expense NeSC workshop we held in January 2006. The exact format has yet to be finalised, but is likely to take the form of a Tech Workshop run in advance of Science Workshops.

5

Whilst all work was completed in preparation for a 2006.4 release, catastrophic failure of one of our main development servers meant that we missed the 31st december deadline for the 2006.4 release. All backups were good and the system (and the processes it hosted) have now been restored on alternative hardware and we will be making an early 2007.1 release in place of the planned 2006.4 release.

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Other Milestones for Cycle-4

Description
AstroGrid Oversight Committee
AGLI meeting : approval of plan
Further AGLI meetings
VO conference at GA, Prague
AGSAG (Durham)
AGDAG (Cambridge)
VOTECH DS planning meeting, Strasbourg
IVOA Interop workshop, Moscow
Cycle-4 planning meetings
Consortium meeting - VO Science theme
VOSAC

Additional activities in Cycle-4

VOTech Commitments

Reports
ID	Task	Status
R01	DS3 Design Study Report	Will be complete by 31-01-2007
Standards
ID	Task	Status
S01a	VOSpace 1.0	Awaiting final approval
S01b	VOSpace 1.x (esp. containers and links)	On-going
S02	Single Sign-On	Awaiting final approval
S03	UWS	On-going
S05	ADQL refactoring	On-going
S06	Simple Table Access Protocol	On-going
S07	Simple time-series Access Protocol	On-going
Prototypes
ID	Task	Status
P01	VOSpace 1.0. Probably VOSpace 1.1 as well	On-going
P02	SSO: community services & TLS support	On-going
P03	UWS-PA	On-going
P04	Cross-match between remote databases	On-going
Production components
ID	Task	Status
C01	DSA/Catalogue (asynchronous ADQL engine with refactored ADQL)	Done
C02	DSA/Simple Table Access Protocol	On-going
C03	DSA/Simple Time Access Protocol	On-going
C04	Registry with V1.0 interface and v1.0 resource-schemata	Done
C05	(Possibly) vos:// protocol handler	On-going
C06	Community (with certificate authority and MyProxy)	Done
C07	(eSTAR) VOEvent: parser and registry integration	Done

External Events

Description
SAAO Visit
All Hands
ADASS
SC06
Birmingham Workshop
CADC
ESAC
RadioNET workshop
AG-SAG
AG-DAG
Consortium meeting
Liverpool JM Workshop

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-- KeithNoddle - 12 Jan 2007