Date: April 14, 2022
Time: 11:00 am Mountain, 1:00 pm Eastern
 Meeting will be held over Zoom. Details in email.

NRAO: Walter Brisken, Steve Tremblay, Mark Claussen, Justin Linford
USNO: David Hall, Megan Johnson, Sara Harding, Lucas Hunt, Chris Dieck
  • Daily Observation Report (P-series)
    • P-series runs every other day.
    • An upcoming maintenance visit to HN to replace elevation bearings will require taking the antenna down for possibly two weeks.
      • Date likely to be mid May, with anticipated downtime from May 15 to approx. 25
      • No plans to switch to an alternate baseline during the down period according to USNO.
      • Z-series to be scheduled with 4 stations to optimize results
  • Other Intensive Observations
    • Z-Series runs approximately every three days.
      • USNO has been unable to make a tsunami connection to OV to download Z-series data, P22087 on March 28 was the last time it worked. Data for P22089 was copied off of disk pack and made available at DSOC.
      • A concern came up about having copies of the Z-series files in the IVS area?
      • The UC003 observations which run simultaneous with the Z-series observations have had their files moved out of the USNO area and into the general astronomy area.
    • Q-series intensive observations at MK run on weekends.
    • I-series "Holiday" intensive observations at MK, substituting for Kokee on federal holidays.
  • Post-Monthly Report Review for March 2022
    • No backlog to catch up on.
    • Two more P-series observations than requested were run in March.
    • UD016 (replacement for UD012) requested 24 hours but only used 15.3 hours.
  • Pre-Monthly Request for May 2022
    • Request acknowledges that not all requested P-series observations may happen in May due to maintenance visit to HN.
    • Request asks that UC003 observations be run simultaneously with other USNO observations whenever possible, such as with P-series observations or the CRD observations which only use SC and MK.
      • VLBA to schedule as possible without interfering with Open Skies observing
  • Open issues
    • USNO reports starting May 2021 have seen a lot of cable cal issues in the Z series.
      • BR notably bad (affecting Z-series). It has been seen there in non-USNO observing too.
      • Move this to long term?
    • Data ingest of IVS data to NRAO/Socorro in support of USNO backup correlator operations:
      • We will do a monthly test of the backup correlator by correlating a WZ-KK intensive. Nominally scheduled for the first Wednesday of the month.
        • April test has been delayed to the second Wednesday, April 13th.
        • Lately there have been problems performing the test due to the WZ-KK intensive not occurring on Wednesdays. Is there a better alternative date?
          • David Hall to discuss and propose some options. Maybe move away from a fixed schedule.
      • A bigger test, hopefully quarterly, of a 24-hour R4 observation is desired. NRAO would like a requirement document to figure out what needs to be done.
        • ACTION: USNO to provide the requirements in two groups. One with the disk space details, and a second with station connection details.
          • Disk space requirements have been received by NRAO.
        • ACTION: NRAO acquire additional storage capacity in support of requirement.
          • Waiting on funding and organizational planning of data management
          • Can begin establishing procedures / permissions for data download prior to operational disk array.
    • Possible changes coming to login accounts on Xcubes, moving it to a group USNO account rather than using individual accounts. No ETA.
      • Part of an overall increase in computer security within NRAO.
    • Higher speed network connections to HN and MK opens the possibility of realtime correlation of intensives.
      • Washington correlator not really able to do realtime correlating yet so it'd have to be done in Socorro which would be a big change (and Socorro's not really set up for it either.)
      • Maybe wait until mid-year and revisit the possibility then.
    • CRD116 no fringes seen in S-band. X-band is okay. CRD114 and CRD115 had fringing problems in both bands. Vex file problems?
      • Problem resolved and tested; CRD118 in May will use known-to-work setup
    • Test correlator in the DSOC is back to not running on all available nodes. It appears that the home directory gets overwritten during updates and it reverts to older setup files which don't configure in all four nodes? USNO will follow up with Mark Wainright.
      • Mark Wainright confirms this has been addressed and is no longer a problem.
  • Long term issues

    • NRAO is starting to do more data downloads during and after observations and this could conflict with USNO's own data downloads of the intensives.
      • Currently NRAO is doing it mostly with a once a week test but it will eventually ramp up.
        • Not ramping up yet.
      • In an effort to coordinate download times between the two groups a small group to discuss it will be formed, probably two people from each side.
        • Nothing has been started yet.
    • USNO emails to ut1 list are not being forwarded along to other USNO people, Mail is being blocked at the Dept. of Defense level. Possible fixes being tried.
      • The switch to @us.navy.mil did not fix the issue, still being investigated.
    • Possible issue raised with accessing of USNO data in the VLBA legacy archive. Any way to put in a request people who do access the data to properly credit USNO and limit access?
      • Requirements have been set, switch to using only the new archive happens in May 2022.
        • Legacy archive will be retired at that point.
      • New archive will require logins, not access keys, which might cause problems for USNO access to their projects.
        • Needs to be worked out with data analysts - have started.
      • New metadata tools scheduled to be included in next update.
    • USNO-NRAO contracts:
      • Networking support contract and correlator support contract were to be merged into the interagency agreement.
        • Current networking support contract extended through May 2022.
          • Plan is for an eight month continuation after that and then longer merged contracts take over after that.
      • Correlator support contract not merged yet, it runs out Oct 2022. A three month extension to January 2023 has been made.
        • An expansion of the correlator storage will possibly added to new contract or will be an additional contract. Might be part of May extension? May also include plans for an upgrade/update of the correlator.
    • There's interest in having VLBA observe along with a VGOS session in "mixed-mode".
      • First IVS needs to move some correlation off to other correlators and then they can start considering adding more stations like VLBA to the VGOS observations. Still having concerns about correlator capacity at June 2021 meeting.
        • Might have come up again in the March 2022 meeting?
    • New IVS session code naming structure
      • There is likely to be a change to format of the IVS "session code", but not until at least 2023.
      • New IVS codes will be similar to existing codes but perhaps slightly longer, for example "NYYYYDOYNN". USNO & Goddard had a discussion about it, length will be more than six characters. NRAO has already used some seven character length codes (such as "N20014B") without it causing any problems.
      • VLBA's scheduling OMS program was tested, it will support up to at least ten characters for projects.
      • The Mark6 disk pack shipping/tracking program Packtrack has some problems with lengthy project codes but there are workarounds. This would only affect any intensives which get correlated in Socorro, currently there are none.
      • Walter Brisken suggested running an end to end test to make sure all of the software can handle the longer names.
        • On hold, it will take some software work on USNO side depending on what IVS comes up with.
      • Formal proposal has been submitted, current timeline would be to make the switch in January 2023.
    • Peculiar delays - VLBA has a delay compared to Kokee that perhaps should be checked out, maybe put some VLBA stations into a KK observation as tagalongs so comparisons can be made. Walter reached out to some people, says it looks like it would be a bigger effort than anticipated and may have to wait until things return to normal after COVID.

  • Fiber Status at each site:
    • 200 Mbps minimum at each site
    • 1 Gbps at PT,KP
    • 2.5 Gbps at HN
    • 10 Gbps at LA,MK
    • 600 Mbps at SC (download up to 400 Mbps)
  • The practical link capacity due to overhead and other traffic is at most 85% of the reported link speed.
Next meeting May 12, 2022?
  • No concerns raised about this date.
-- JimOgle - 2022-04-09
Topic revision: r4 - 2022-04-18, JimOgle
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