Minutes from 19 January 2010

2010/01/19 CSEP Meeting

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

1. Phil raised an issue of supporting CSEP operations:
   • New hire to operate the testing center, Masha will continue new software development
   • Phil suggested possible solutions:
     • to freeze CSEP at V10.4.0 until further CSEP funding is received
     • to have software releases less frequently
       1. Danijel pointed out that it's vital to show that CSEP is growing
          • It's OK if new CSEP features are introduced (for example, new evaluation test)
          • On the other hand, time-dependent models are entering the testing center every 3 months
2. csep-op:
   1. NFS server:
      • John will consider available options beginning of the 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. V10.1.0 is running on csep-op as of 2009/01/08 without any problems
   3. From 2009/12/15 meeting: 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
3. Phil asked about status for the CSEP proposal
   • Danijel said it's in progress
   • Group is ready to contribute
4. From 2009/12/15 meeting: 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
5. Software development:
   1. Trac tickets:
      • FIXED: #178 Add a sanity check for number of observed events in cumulative result Discovered problem due to the fix running on csep-cert:
        • #207 Inconsistent number of events for 2009-10-03, 2009-11-03, 2009-12-03 observation catalogs of RELM-Mainshock group
        • #205 Possibility of including the same month CMT events from final and preliminary catalogs
      • #185 Generate summary tables per each evaluation test
   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
6. From 2009/12/08 meeting: CSEP policies
   1. Should discuss if SCEC Testing Center results should be open to the public
      • Danijel will get back to the group
   2. Danijel will work on more content for the main CSEP web pages
7. 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
8. From 2010/01/12 meeting: John and Masha discussed necessary changes to support web application to view CSEP results:
   • CSEP will publish already existing configuration file for each forecast group to the web server
   • Web service will use file system discover method to identify:
     1. avalable testing regions
     2. available forecasts groups within each testing region
   • Configuration file for each forecast group should include:
     1. Base name of currently tested forecast file
     2. Flag if forecast start date is part of the forecast filename
   • John asked if CSEP Dispatchers should publish any XML format files to the web server at all:
     1. May run into problem of displaying results for not finished evaluation tests
        • May introduce a "lock" to indicate if evaluation is in progress
     2. Makes sense not to duplicate results - especially the ones that nobody is going to look at
9. 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