Download this report as a PDF.

This is the report for the end of the third project (months 7-9).

Link to the Deliverables Table

Deliverables due during the second reporting quarter:

The following deliverables were submitted to and their receipt acknowledged by the Commission during this quarter:

The Project Office received word that James Cullen has started work on the project at Manchester. We look forward to hearing more from him as the project progresses.

The Management Team held a telecon on 2 Feb 2011. The meeting covered basic administrative issues and minutes have been recorded.

The minutes have been distributed to the Management Team. They should be available on the wiki once we decide if there is anything sensitive that needs to be held from the public site.

On 10 March, Huib and Charles met with Jarkko in Brussels to discuss a handful of items. The meeting was scheduled out of convenience as the NEXPReS side were in Brussels for another meeting. The meeting was fairly short, bullet list below highlights the topics.

• Annual Report
  • date of review will be late September 2011
  • minimal group from consortium to participate (prob 4 people total)
  • do not require user presentation (xref EXPReS)
  • potential for non-Brussels location, but still leaning in that direction
• legal/financial discussions
  • continuing lack of clarity on the modificaiton of “annex 2” via email of 8 march 2011, but it is believed that we can ignore this
  • (effectively) audit certificates only required for JIVE

Revised Consortium Agreement sent out to Board. Awaiting input and comment back from lawyers.

As of 1 April, we still have two partners who have requests to modify specific portions of the text. We are working with them to make sure that the changes are required (from their point of view) and then to make sure that the changes will not be problematic to the rest of the partners who have agreed to the text as drafted. We hope to complete this process as quickly as possible, but are at the mercy of a group of lawyers.

NEXPReS invited and JIVE hosted WP8/Ari to give a presentation at JIVE. See WP8 section below for futher details.

Huib van Langevelde gave a talk titles “EXPReS and NEXPRes, an evolution pathway for VLBI in the SKA era” at the “future of the VLBA” workshop at NRAO headquarters in Charlottesville, VA, on January 29

Zsolt Paragi gave a talk on “eVLBI” at the workshop “Probing the radio continuum Universe with SKA pathfinders” at Lorentz center Leiden on February 25

No deliverables were due this quarter.

Planning is underway for the EVN-NREN meeting, tentatively sched for the end of May in Aviero, Portugal. The May date means that the deliverable associated with this meeting will be 2 months late.

The meeting will take place in conjunction with a related IT/radioastronomy meeting that is being hosted by Instituto de Telecomunicações. It is felt that holding the meeting in conjunction with another meeting will increase the number of participants. Additional information available on the meeting's website: http://www.av.it.pt/workshops/ict_vlbi2ska.html

There were no presentations on behalf of the EVN-NREN this quarter.

No deliverables were due this quarter.

Note, the WP Leader has informed the Project Office that D3.1 scheduled for October of this year will most likely occur in November. The members of the eVSAG are also members of the EVN-PC and the PC meetings are a stronger draw than the work package. Thus, it makes sense to adjust the work package meeting to coincide with the PC meeting.

The workpackage hosted no meetings this quarter.

There were no presentations on behalf of the eVSAG this quarter.

The results of the first global e-VLBI science observations (non-testing, non-demo) were published in a letter to the Astronomy & Astrophysics journal (abstract, full HTML). A press release was issued by JIVE on behalf of NEXPReS.

A project brochure (D4.6) was completed, printed and distributed to partners in month 9. PDFs and source files have been placed in the WP4 section of the wiki.

No WP4 meetings are necessary.

There were no presentations made this quarter.

Work at JIVE during the first quarter of 2011 concentrated on control systems. A first version of a general job startup GUI was created and tested. This version will only handle the JIVE-developed SFXC software correlator for now. Eventually however it will be the single portal to all EVN correlators, controlling also the current MarkIV hardware and the future UniBoard FPGA-based correlator. This system will also be essential to enable remote control and semi-automated operations. A VEX-MySQL translation system, originally developed for the UniBoard project, was further modified and debugged for the general control system.

Work started on the merging of the local Mark5B playback code (“domino”) with the JIVE-developed Mark5 control system (jive5AB), which will greatly simplify the maintenance of the control code and present the operators with one standard interface. The jive5AB control software itself, completely overhauled in 2010, saw further improvements dealing with the timing of threads and the optimal use of available CPU power. A diskpack reservation system was implemented, which will be needed in the future to prevent clashes between correlators running simultaneously. Station logging, needed for rapid feedback in case of failures, was further improved, as was the on-the-fly data format conversion, which now includes both MarkIV and VLBA - VDIF conversion.

At TUM good progress was made: the preliminary work is being finalized and programming on authentication has started. Updates and fixes were made and essential add-ons created, like an automated code checker for continuous quality control and facilities for extended unit testing. e-Control features were created for stability checks and an HTML-based help functionality was made available. All tools are now included in automated test suites. Work on system monitoring got underway while a web server will be available soon.

Several telecons were held with colleagues at MIT Haystack Observatory and NASA Washington, in preparation of the standardization of system monitoring within the MCI (Monitoring and Control Infrastructure) Collaboration Group. A concept was made for an implementation of (semi-)automated systems within the Wettzell observatory, through a 5 year plan.

Work at ALTOO on WP5 has not started yet in this quarter. This does not imply any delay however, the involvment of ALTOO is not expected before year 2 of the project

Unfortunately, it has been impossible until now to fill the softare engineering position available at JIVE for this work package (a problem not limited to this particular work package). While several candidates will be interviewed in the coming weeks, it is clear that some delay is unavoidable. In particular, deliverable D5.4, due in month 9, will have to be postponed by several months at least. On the positive side, work on several other deliverables was pushed forward and is progressing faster than originally planned, notably deliverables D5.5 (VDIF Mark5 conversion software) and D5.10 (Corner-turning platform). In all, work package 5 remains on track, although we may have to re-consider the timing of some of the deliverables.

A WP5 telecon was held in March 2011 involving JIVE, TUM and MPG, to discuss progress, issues related to hiring and spending and identify potential problems.

* Neidhardt, A.; Ettl, M.; Rottmann, H.; Plötz, C.; Mühlbauer, M.; Hase, H.; Alef, W.; Sobarzo, S.; Herrera, C.; Himwich, E.: E-control: First public release of remote control software for VLBI telescopes; in: Behrend, D.; Baver, K. D. (eds.) VLBI2010: From Vision to Reality, IVS 2010 General Meeting Proceedings, NASA/CP–2010–215864, pp 439-443, NASA, Goddard Space Flight Center, 2010

* Ettl, M.; Neidhardt, A.; Mühlbauer, M.; Plötz, C.; Beaudoin, C.: The Wettzell system monitoring concept and first realizations; in: Behrend, D.; Baver, K. D. (eds.) VLBI2010: From Vision to Reality, IVS 2010 General Meeting Proceedings, NASA/CP–2010–215864, pp 444-448, NASA, Goddard Space Flight Center, 2010

* Szomoru, A.: EXPReS and NEXPReS, the future of European VLBI, in PoS(10th EVN Symposium)035, the proceedings of the 10th European VLBI Network Symposium and EVN Users Meeting: VLBI and the new generation of radio arrays, Manchester UK, September 20-24, 2010

We held another telecon on 2011-03-31 to discuss the work on MS601, the provisioning of Bandwidth on Demand paths, and the testing/validation task. The minutes of the telecon are online at Minutes of NEXPReS MS601 telecon on 2011-03-31. Work in Manchester is well under way with building testbeds for network testing, both FPGA-based and PC-based. As the NSI protocol has now been released, we can start filling in at least part of the system architecture part of MS601. We have also made the decision not to implement the interim `Fenius' protocol for our BoD applications, as NSI has been released and is being implemented. JIVE and ASTRON jointly interviewed several participants for the vacancies in the NEXPReS project, including more manpower for WP6, and we hope to be up to strength soon.

No deliverables were due in this quarter, but progress has been made on the planning of the first international BoD path for NEXPReS. Work on MS601 is progressing albeit slower than wanted, as the standards that we will be implementing have only just been finalized.

We held a telecon on 2011-03-31, see above.

None in this quarter.

Deliverables D7.1 and D7.2 were finalized and acknowledged by the EC. A design document for supporting VLBI background and triggered observations (Task 2 in DOW) has been written at OSO. PSNC produced a draft document on their research into suitable web technologies.

Work on the SFXC software correlator continue. The correlator is being used for production correlation at JIVE now. As a result a number of bugs/issues have been discovered and fixed, greatly improving the reliability of the software. This is very important for the automated correlation planned in WP7. Improvements have been made to the new multiple phase center support, a feature that makes the correlator a more powerful tool for conducting surveys as they were proposed in Task 2 of the WP.

An interface to track progress of a correlation job has been implemented. The interface includes so-called weight plots, which are an important tool for judging the quality of he output data of the correlator. This code will need to be integrated into the workflow at some later stage.

Mark Kettenis attended some WP5 and WP8 telecons and was present at meetings during Ari Mujunens visit to JIVE in order to track progress of the work done in those WPs in anticipations of milestone MS707.

Work on evaluating and selecting the portal framework for the workflow manager and correlation platform continued. A draft docuemnt was distributed along the WP7 partners and is in the final editing stage and will be available on the project Wiki soon. Work on prototyping the workflow manager will start soon after the final technology selection has been made (leaning towards Liferay). The results will be presented at the meeting in Poznan April 19-20.

At Onsala a design document for Task 2 has been written. The aim of this document is to both identify the requirements needed for the software which is to be produced, as well as to propose methods with which the Workflow Manager can interact with this software. In order to to test the software, a dummy installation of the NASA Field System (i.e. has no hardware to communicate with) has been prepared inside a virtual machine running Linux. Test code has been produced which is able to communicate with the Field System and issue commands to it.

After JIVE SFX correlator successful installation and the first function tests, VIRAC team began studies of more detail correlator functionality and operation methods. The main goals of this activity is to prove understanding of data formats involved and to gain experience by training on real session data, both believed to be needed for successful work flow manager development.

At the moment our team is also busy correlating different types of data ( VIRAC own space debris sessions data and data from The Medicina Radio Observatory - VLBI observations of quasars) on the SFXC correlator which is installed on our HPC cluster in order to gain better knowledge and understanding of the inside structure of this correlator as well as to check the correctness of results obtained using our own correlator written by the staff of Ventspils International Radio Astronomy Center (VIRAC).

D7.2 was completed on January 13 2011. Both the D7.1 and D7.2 documents have been made available on the project Wiki.

Telecons were held on January N, 2011 and March 29 20112. Minutes will be available on the project Wiki shortly.

A meeting on workflow manager technologies and implementation has been scheduled for April 19-20 at PSNC in Poznan. A WP7 side-meeting is being planned for to coincide with the ICT VLBI2SKA meeting May 24-26 in Aveiro to take advantage of the fact that several of the people involved on WP7 will be in Aveiro for the conference and/or other side-meetings.

No publications/presentations were made this quarter.

The main activity was the deliverable D8.2 “Hardware design document for simultaneous I/O storage element” released 28-Feb-2011.

Deliverable D8.2 describes the reasoning for different architectures and suggests two possible concrete designs. However, testing done in March suggests some major modifications to the design. The main points are:

1. It turned out that the Highpoint RocketRaid cards in the design do not work well with new Linux kernels, especially kernel does not get hotswap notifications. We now recommend using disk controller cards that are based on LSI2008 chip that has good Linux support. LSI2008 board is preliminarily tested (only one) and it worked as expected. Note that delivery times for these cards seem to be several weeks everywhere.

2. Motherboard Asus Crosshair IV Extreme turned out to be little suspicious in PCIe support (as documented in D8.2) but it is preliminarily tested in March and it may work fine (not tested with full configuration yet, some cards did not work with it)

3. We found still one promising reasonably priced almost COTS solution that we likely will test: Supermicro 36-disk case with Intel Xeon motherboard with two processors and 3+4 true PCIe slots (both CPUs have access to all PCIe but they are directly connected to one and indirectly connected to another).

4. Redundant power supply is not feasible to arrange with standard PC power supplies as described in the deliverable. Supermicro system does that with two powerful redundant 12V power supplies and one non-redundant 12V→5V transforming and wiring unit.

We plan to revise the delivarable D8.2 during the next quarter. The detailed description of planned modifications are in the project wiki page.

Deliverable D8.1 was discussed in a telephone meeting with other work groups 12th January. There was some discussion of the details but there were no concrete suggestions to change it.

WP had some internal discussions of the authentication model presented in D8.1 and it was reiterated that using SSH with public key of the central site installed to the authorized_hosts file in the buffer (as written in D8.1) is by far the simplest solution and it should be secure enough to the intended use. There is however a need to write a detailed instructions how to maintain the security in some special situations (when host key has changed, how to distribute the public key in secure way (https site) and what to do if the secret key of the central site is compromised).

A meeting with D8.1, D8.2 and D8.3 teams is planned to verify that D8.3 work can start.

There is a planned meeting in May in Aveiro in VLBI/SKA workshop where all WP8 participants will meet.

D8.2 completed

18 February 2010 - Colloquium talk at ASTRON/JIVE by Ari Mujunen: “Storage in Astronomy: Beyond the limits of bandwidth, capacity, and location” (PDF)