Minutes from 15 December 2009

2009/12/15 CSEP Meeting

Attendees: Phil M., John Y., Masha L.

1. csep-op:
   1. NFS server:
      • John will consider available options beginning of next year
      • John wants to try separating testing regions to different disks
        1. Masha said it's OK since all testing regions are independent from each other
   2. V9.10.1 release: no problems
   3. Phil asked what is the most difficult part in operating the testing center:
      • Masha responded - keeping track of re-processing tasks
        1. NFS failures during re-processing
        2. SciPy failure during re-processing
      • Phil suggested to have fixed re-processing schedule
        1. Once per 6 months - will discuss with a group
2. Phil asked about status for the CSEP proposal
   • No news
   • Group is ready to contribute
3. Phil suggested to use iRODS as data management for CSEP:
   • John will look into it some time early January
   • John suggested to use VirtualMachine to distribute CSEP software
     1. Will need to have different images for different testing centers due to the installed forecasts models
4. Software development:
   1. V10.1.0 release candidate running on csep-cert since 2009/12/08:
      • Unit and acceptance tests passed
      • Acceptance tests for web viewer passed
      • Masha sent out announcement to other testing centers asking to upgrade their development servers
        1. Fabian installed YUM packages for EU testing center: had to re-build Fortran binaries for the models - due to different architecture (AMD Opteron system with 2212HE processor)
        2. Matt responded that he plans to upgrade some time soon
   2. Yan sent out an announcement about "FULL EARTH HIGH-RESOLUTION (0.1x0.1 degree) EARTHQUAKE FORECASTS"
      • Using PDE catalog
      • Will discuss integration of the forecast within CSEP
   3. Trac tickets addressed for V10.1.0:
      • #191 Create European YUM distribution
      • #190 Isolate source code of installed forecasts models to testing region sub-directory
      • #192 Install Alvaro Gonzalez one-day alarm-based models for Western Pacific testing regions
      • #193 Install Alvaro Gonzalez one-day alarm-based models for Global testing region
      • #177 XML format of forecast should still be passed through master XML template
      • #195: XML format of the EAST forecast provides wrong value for defaultMagBinDimension
      • #198 EAST model incorrectly reads forecastStartDate from input parameter file
      • #194 Eliminate use of decimal.Decimal module from CSEPXMLGeneric.py conversion utilities
        1. Runtime when using Decimal took about 24 minutes to convert ASCII format of the forecast to XML, now takes under 1minute
5. From 2009/12/08 meeting: CSEP policies
   1. Danijel suggested to open Trac pages:
      • John and Masha confirmed that models source codes have restricted SVN access
   2. Should discuss if SCEC Testing Center results should be open to the public
      • Danijel will get back to the group
   3. CSEP code distribution should be open to the public:
      • Masha mentioned that main CSEP web page has a link to the distribution under Software
      • Will become public once we open up CSEP Trac to the public
   4. Danijel will work on more content for the main CSEP web pages
6. From 2009/10/06 meeting: Fabian presented slides for new implementation of CSEP results web viewer
   • Proposed to use Django based on Model-View-Controller paradigm
   • Split results viewer into:
     • web service for CSEP data products (maps, XML results datasets)
       • Use Database to store CSEP results by Dispatcher
         • John pointed out that it might be redundant to split already available XML results for injection to the database, then reconstruct XML from the database
         • John pointed out that would need to inject already existing data into the database
         • Masha is worried about making it error-prone due to the reprocessing
         • Very minimal work on operational CSEP software if only need to change to publish XML results vs. SVG plots
         • Fabian could work on implementation
         • Danijel suggested to create tests summaries by Dispatcher
           1. Masha suggested to implement visualization of the summary on web server site by CSEP Toolkit modules
     • interactive web application to present data products
       • Danijel asked about authentication for Japanese viewer
         • John suggested to use Apache's one
     • Danijel asked if it shold be integrated into Drupal?
       • John suggested to try a simple example to see if it works
     • James asked why not to use Plone
       • John said that we used to use Plone, but migrated away from it, but may be should investigate more
     • John asked how to discover what is available:
       1. Danijel suggested to use URL queries to discover
       2. Masha suggested that Dispatcher could update already existing configuration files for forecasts groups with current forecasts filenames and publish it as well
       3. John suggested to use allmodels.xml that current web viewer has
7. Hardware:
   1. csep-cert
      • CSEPWebTest.py is not part of nightly build - some issues connecting to the web server
        1. John is looking at the problem