NAASC Meeting for Sept 01, 2010

MEETING CANCELED DUE TO INTEGRATED TESTING AND ALMA PRIMER UPDATES

Table of Contents


This agenda is available at https://safe.nrao.edu/wiki/bin/view/ALMA/NAASCMtgAgenda

Meeting Logistics:

  • Call date: Wednesday, Sep 01, 2010
  • Call time 13:00 ET or 17:00 UT
  • Duration: 1.0 hr
  • Locations: CV-ER230/TUC-N525/Soc280(SO-conf2)/JAO-Alsacia/JAO-OSF(Science)/NRC
  • Connection for Video:
    • From NRAO select "CV-ER230"
    • hub ip=192.33.117.16
    • alternative ip for Chile only, if above drops: 192.33.117.17
  • USA toll-free Number: 866-675-5385
  • Outside USA Number: +1 517-444-6916
  • Passcode: 8445333#
  • Leader: Hibbard

Attendees:

  • CV:
  • TUC:
  • Socorro:
  • Canada:
  • Chile:
  • Other:

Action Items from past meetings (RED=OPEN)

  • ACTION: Solicit ANASAC travel information
    • WHO: Management Group
    • DUE: ASAP
    • DONE:
    • NOTES:
  • ACTION: Send out pre-registration announcement for meeting

Action Items from this meeting:

  • ACTION:
    • WHO:
    • DUE:
    • DONE:
    • NOTES:

Agenda

  • Project News (APeck/RHills or CSV Liaisons)
  • Group Reports
    • Management Group (Carol)
      • ANASAC (AWootten)
        • Last telecon: July 23 Agenda.
        • ANASAC f2f meeting Sept 13-14 in Charlottesville; ASAC meets Oct 13-14 in Santiago.
      • Upcoming NAASC Science Visitors: None (see google calendar NAASC Visitors)
      • Science Communications (Mark Adams)
      • EPO (John Stoke)
    • News from NRC (Schieven)
    • User Support Group (Crystal)
    • Data Services Group (Mark)
    • JAO Support Group (John H) * Current NA CSV turnos: Tony Aug 7- Oct 16 (see NAASC2Chile)
      • Darrel went down Aug 11-25 for "fast mapping" tests
      • 2nd Integrated test (Aug 24-Sept 22)
        • See ALMALookingAhead for staged timeline
        • NA Testers:
          • Full test: JH, HL, EF, AE, KS, AR, ML, BK
          • Through Sept 9 (TA): CB, TH, RF, AW
          • Through Sept 2 or 3 (OT-ph1/Load test): BM, SS
      • OT/PHT report (Harvey)
  • Main Event:

Additional Supporting Material

NAASC items submitted to JAO for August 2010 Monthly report

Hiring activities
Preparations were made for the arrival of NAASC postdoc Amy Kimball (U. Washington) who will join the NAASC in mid September, and of NAASC Scientist Scott Schnee (NRC-HIA), who will join in early October.

JAO support
Tony Remijan is serving a 2mo tour for CSV support from Aug 9 - Oct 16. The NAASC convened a "Tiger Team" to download, examine and reduce ALMA data, as a means of providing feedback to a similar "Imaging Team" organized by CSV (which includes some of the same NAASC members). This effort will ultimately serve as a training experience for NAASC staff and help us develop end-user documentation for ALMA data reduction and analysis.

Software Development & testing
Harvey Liszt attended the face-to-face meeting of the ALMA Observing Tool development team in Edinburgh, UK, to help plan for the 2nd ALMA Integrated test. The helpdesk was successfully integrated with the ALMA "single sign-on" authentication system and deployed for the integrated test, and a helpdesk Staff Guide, testing instructions, and test matrix were provided to testers. A total of 11 NAASC staff and 3 NRC-HIA staff participated in "phase 1" of the 2nd ALMA Integrated test that started August 25, testing the ALMA User Portal, Observing Tool, and helpdesk.

CASA development work included the completion of phase 1 of a spectral line fitting implementation which includes simultaneous fitting of multiple Gaussians and a polynomial baseline, extensive logging, and well-documented return values, and work on a CASA offline splatalogue search.

Improvements were made on the "Splatalogue" web interface at www.splatalogue.net, and an ALMA document describing Splatalog is being prepared. An subset of spectral lines was defined for, and provided to, the ALMA Observing Tool (for offline use) and CASA.

Conferences and workshops
An ALMA talk was given at the Symposium on Physical Chemistry of Spectrochemical Analysis, at the Fall 2010 American Chemical Society national meeting.

Pre-registration opened and planning continues for the NAASC/NRC workshop entitled "ALMA: Extending the Limits of Astrophysical Spectroscopy", to be held Jan 15-17 2011 in Victoria, BC (see http://www.almatelescope.ca/Spectroscopy2011/). Planning continues for NAASC participation in the January AAS in Seattle WA, including an ALMA Special Session: "Observing with ALMA" on Jan 12.

Other
NAASC and NRC staff made extensive revisions to the "ALMA Primer", an introductory document for the ALMA-interested science community. This includes the addition of science examples for ALMA Early Science.

NAASC Readiness Testing is underway and going well for a High-Availability cluster that will serve the ALMA helpdesk and the NAASC-instance of the ALMA User Portal.

We formulated charges for a face-to-face meeting of the ALMA North American Science Advisory (ANASAC) advisory committee, which will take place September 13-14 in Charlottesville. Finally, we worked on an operations "Risk Register".

-- JohnHibbard - 2010-09-08
Topic revision: r2 - 2011-01-05, JohnHibbard
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