SAAO / AstroGrid Workshop

DRAFT - to be completed

Introduction

A small AstroGrid team visited the SAAO HQ in Observatory, Cape Town, South Africa for the week 3-7 Jul 2006. During this time an AstroGrid installation was carried out at the SAAO, and a range of technical and scientific staff were given instruction as to the support and use of the AstroGrid system

Participants

• David Buckley (SALT Project Scientist)
• Anne Charles (SALT Archive DB expert)
• Phil Charles (SAAO Director)
• Roy Emmerich (SAAO IT Manager)
• Encarni Romero Colmenero (SALT astronomer/ archive specialist)
• Martin Still (SALT astronomer/ archive specialist)
• EduardoGonzalezSolares
• NicholasWalton
• NoelWinstanley

Work Activities

• Installation of AstroGrid System Components locally at SAAO (see screenshots below)
  • Registry
  • Community (za.ac.saao)
  • MySpace - FileManager and FileStore
  • DSA (Tycho2 catalogue installed)
  • CEA (iraf scripts installed)

SaaoAgWorkshopInstallationFeedback collects comments and issues arising from the installation.

• Astronomers were shown how to use the Astrogrid workbench to do their science. One-to-one demonstrations giving them the oportunity of using Astrogrid and providing a background on the Virtual Observatory were carried out during the week. These demonstrations included applications like Astroscope, Topcat, Aladin, etc. as well as more advanced topics like workflows and scripting. Particularly the access of Astrogrid services from python scripts was well received. In general the acceptance of Astrogrid was very positive and worth using for science and for publishing the SALT data.

• In order to deal with the low bandwidth in the SAAO a cached copy of the Workbench was installed so astronomers do not need to download it from UK.

• Walton gave an invited presentation at the 51st Annual Conference of the SAIP, 3-7 July 2006, University of the Western Cape
  • see http://www.saip2006.tlabs.ac.za/
  • other groups in SA now with increased interest in use of AstroGrid (UCT, HMO, etc)

Outcomes and Future Plans

• SAAO to consider use of AG in the SA context
  • initial hardware implications - ~2TB RAID for local MySpace, dual core CPU server for CEA apps.
  • two aims: publish SALT data through the VO, setup VO system in SA
• Discuss with Phil Charles / Gordon Brommage (UK SALT Collaboration Chair) (at the IAU Prague) followup science workshop.