Meeting Minutes (18 June 2008)

Attending: DanaBalser, NicoleRadziwill, JeanGeorge, AshishArte, LoriAppel, MarkClaussen, BarryClark, JoanWrobel, RonMaddalena, ToneyMinter

  • Sharing Phenomena

OpenSky believes this to be a cache page issue. A page is created and when it gets served it gets the wrong IP address. No data value cross-talk has been detected so far. They have designed a test that they will run this week. Some of the transient info reported (e.g., source group called "Water" from BrianMason) were not in the database. Why have we not detected these problems in the past? The different versions of Apache, Tomcat, and Spring have been upgraded so there are differences. OpenSky is looking for problems with these new versions. We should report any problems like these ASAP. The technical reviews might provide some additional information.

  • Author/Institution

There were many help-desk items concerning this issue. One concern was with the user interface for the drop-down menu for author institution that needs to be addressed. The other concern is that users are frustrated when they try to submit the proposal near the deadline but cannot since an author's institution is incomplete. We could add a note with the implications of adding authors and institutions when the author is added so the users is aware of this constraint.

Do we really need valid author information for submission? Certainly we need complete information for the PI and contact person. We need to check with DaleFrail about this policy based on the current user feedback. There are proposal processing issues since we do not want to process the proposal with incomplete or invalid information. OpenSky could flag these proposals. It was suggested that we could add a note to the email with proposal information to clean up author information.

We agreed to think more about this issue to find a better solution.

  • Online Help-desk

This would be in addition to the current Help-desk and seems to work well for the GBT dynamic scheduling system. Should we add this to the PST? The response from the group was positive. We would probably need to coordinate our schedules but otherwise this should be straight forward.

  • New Resources
    • VLA/EVLA
      1. Special call for Ka-band.
      2. Call for S-band (in Feb).
      3. Refine VLA sub-arrays.
    • GBT (probably nothing for Oct).
      1. Maybe change for S-band receiver.
      2. Cicada back-end (maybe in Feb).
    • VLBA/HSA (some small adjustments).
      1. Require VLBA/HSA ASAP for all submissions (run by Bob and Dale).
      2. Add student support.
      3. Software correlator.
    • Joint Proposals. NicoleRadziwill will talk to DaleFrail about any progress.

  • Proposal Handling

Can any development be performed to aid in proposal processing after Oct 1 but for this deadline? LoriAppel still cannot do duplex printing or batch printing of the proposals.

We eventually wish to have referee accounts which would greatly simplify proposal processing (see IntxSvcsMR6C2n308). As a zeroth step we could allow referees to download proposals only which would mitigate some of the problems. We would need to add assignments for the referees. We should talk with CarlBignell who has software to do this now.

  • PST/DSS. We need to discuss how the proposal submission tool (PST) will tie into the GBT dynamic scheduling system (DSS). What information is required from the PST? It is probably too early to determine.

  • Feedback Survey. We need to complete the feedback survey and send to users who submitted a proposal for the Jun deadline. (DanaBalser and NicoleRadziwill).

  • Tracy Clarke's email (see below). Please feel free to add comments. Once we converge on some answers we can send a reply.


I have again encountered several serious problems with the porposal submission tool while trying to complete my VLA proposal. In case the browser matters I was using Safari on Mac OSX Leopard. The main problems were:

-- 4P mode is still not supported, the instructions say to put both resources in and manually modify the times but there does not appear to be any way to comply with these instructions. The times are fixed and the system will not accept a modifier of 0.5 as the multiplier. Rather than have the proposal appear to ask for double the time I chose to modify the second frequency of the 4 band code to be a P band frequency. This meant my time was ok but my bandwidth codes and channels were wrong. The system also warned that if this does not pass the technical evaluation it could be rejected. It should not be this difficult on proposers to use a standard observing mode in PST and we certainly should not risk technical rejection because the system cannot be configured by the user for the desired mode.

Here is what is in the documentation:

"While normally one may use only a single receiver at a time on the VLA, one may observe simultaneously in both 4 and P bands (4P mode) or in both L and P bands (LP mode). Such receiver modes cannot be specified as a single VLA resource. Instead, two resources must be specified (e.g., one resource for 4 band and one for P band) and both resources must be added to the source/resource pairs for the relevant session. You should also specify the same observing time for each of those source/resource pairs, and manually modify the total session time to correct for having the resources available simultaneously. Finally, you should also add a description of this situation in the comments field of the session."

Ask Mark C. Need to note this in email to proposers.

-- the 'General" tab deleted all my edits when I tried to save simply because I had not yet written my abstract. The tab should always save partial information so people can return to edit/add information later!

I am not sure how this happened since a pop-up gives you a warning and will not let you save the page. If you cancel then you should not expect any data to be saved. Investigate for 9A.

-- the 'Add author' button on the Author page would not return anything in the search for people whose names were definately in the author list.

Investigate for 9A.

-- if one clicks on 'edit resources' the system reverts all settings back to the default of 4 band, single line continuum etc. This changes all the frequency settings that were made, resets the hanning smoothing, modifies the correlator setup and even changes the configuration! Each small edit (necessary because of the 4P issue described above) forced me to re-do everything and nearly led to submission of the proposal with incorrect information.

Add text to say do front-end/back-end first.

-- there is no option for pseudo-continuum on the General page

I think she just wants us to add psuedo-continuum in the list of observing types in the General page. Ask Mark C.; do resources need to change?

-- On the list of proposals page it would be nice to allow the user to search their proposals by configuration as well.

Schedule for 9A release.

Tracy

-- DanaBalser - 18 Jun 2008
Topic revision: r1 - 2008-06-18, DanaBalser
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