Phone Meeting 2006-03-21 15:30 UT

Participants: KlausBanse, BiancaGarilli, PrebenGrosbol, PeterLinde, DanielPonz, KlausReinsch, ChristianSurace, ThijsVanDerHulst, BillCotton, DougTody

Agenda and minutes

1. General information
   • Annual report and other OPTICON news
     • The OPTICON annual report for 2005 is almost ready. PG added references to the 3 ADASS papers submitted. This concluded our part of the report. When a final version is available a link to it will be posted.
   • Presentations at IAU GA in Prague, Aug. 2006
     • There will be options for spreading information on our work at the IAU GA, namely: a) the session of the IAU Working Group for Astronomical Data (WGAD), and b) the VO special session on ASTRONOMICAL DATA MANAGEMENT ref. SPS6. It may be reasonable to present our work at one or both occasions. The deadline is in May so we can decide at next phone meeting.
2. Face-to-face meeting
   • Dates for next Face-to-face meeting
     • A clear majority would like our next face-to-face meeting in the period June 12-14. As we only plan for a 1.5 day meeting it was concluded that meeting will start in the late morning of Monday June 12 (10-11) and finish not too late in the afternoon on Tuesday June 13. This to allow people to arrive Monday morning and leave Tuesday evening. The exact start time will be decided when the arrival of people are better known.
     • People who plan to participate should contact the DMD secretary Nina Felber (with copy to PG) to arrange for travel and accommodations. Going through ESO would reduce you layouts for your travel claim (for regular members for which OPTICON will paid).
   • Main agenda items
     • The f2f meeting should at least cover the following issues:
       • Finalize written review of high-level requirements (see below)
       • Summary of the current and planned prototype efforts including Milan-Marseille, Sampo etc.
       • First discussion on interface specifications
       • Plans for OPTICON FP7 proposal
3. Requirements
   • Work on high-level requirements
     • A first phone meeting (with BG, PG, PL and DP) on Mar. 17 organized the work of adding narratives/explanations to the individual requirements. The next will be on Apr. 6. The objective is to finish the document by the subgroup early May.
   • Time line for v.1 of requirements
     • In order to have a final discussion during the f2f meeting we need to release the document no later than May 12 leaving 3 weeks for people to submit written comments. Written replies would then be produced in the week just before the meeting.
4. Proto-types
   • Frameworks prototypes - OpenRTE (DT)
     • DT gave a summary of the OpenRTE and OpenMPI. Compared to low level frameworks (e.g. CORBA, ICE, DBus), OpenRTE offers a much richer set of features ant would be much faster to use for our Execution Framework. It is based on OpenMPI which provides essential support for distributed, parallel execution of task. The software is open source and quite light weight. It is written in C with bindings to C++ and Fortran. There are projects with respect Java binding (see Eclipse PTP) and it should be simple to get a Python interface. It provides publish/subscribe mechanisms and can monitor changes of properties.
     • All are encourage to read some of the documentation before the next phone meeting so we can have a more detailed discussion.
   • Other prototype work
     • CS briefed on the Milan-Marseille prototype. The intention is to implement parts of the interactive VIMOS pipeline in a framework compatible with our architectural concept. Real work will first start next week so only few firm decisions have been made.
   • Interface specifications
     • This point was more a reminder on that we need very soon to start a detailed discussion of interfaces required i.e. no later the our f2f meeting in June
5. Actions
   • Status of open actions (see ActionList)
   • Summary of new actions (see below)
6. Time for next phone meeting
   • Suggestion: 2006-04-18 14:30 UT (16:30 CET)
7. Any other business
   • The only significant outstanding action was to contact ALMA/AIPS++ for a more detailed description of the CASA interface. DT promised to check what was happening. (See CASA Architecture for an overview. I will post something further if/when more information becomes available. - DT)

Please add what I forgot and correct my errors.