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VO Interfaces at the CSIRO ASKAP Science Data Archive (CASDA).
This week, I am reporting on a presentation I heard by James Dempsey of CSIRO at the IVOA meeting in Sydney, November 2015. You can download the presentation at the meeting site here.
ASKAP is the Australian SKA Pathfinder, a project intended to inform the technologies and data management techniques to be used when the SKA enters operations. ASKAP, a powerful instrument in its own right, uses 36 x 12m dishes, with a maximum baseline of 6 km, a 30 deg sq field-of-view, operating over the range 700 – 1800 MHz, with a 300 MHz bandwidth and 16,384 channels. The project is a large scale endeavor in its own right, and will produce 5 PB of data per year.
The CSIRO ASKAP Science Data Archive (CASDA) is providing a long-term science archive for data products produced by ASKAP, as reported in the presentation:
Data products include:
CASDA has been building VO-compliant services into their interfaces from the ground up. In particular, they are early adopters of the IVOA Simple Image Access Protocol (SIAP) version 2, and they cite the following benefits of this protocol:
- Multi-dimensional support
- Represents the future of image access in the VO
- Stable, and
- Flexible.
They have developed a prototype SIAP implementation, and when, complete, they intend to deliver it as part of a “VO package” that can be used to deploy services at other institutions, along with verification and validation tools. The services developed so far (November 2015) take advantage of several VO services: SIAP is used to discover data, Data Link to to list the access methods and Access Data to provide access to a file or a subset of its contents. They have found no serious barriers to implementation, but do cite the inevitable lack of clients often faced by early adopters, and that it has been hard to express services in Data Link with the project’s style sheet approach. Nevertheless, CASDA has been able to deliver a minimum viable product, and here is a summary of the status of their services:
Source: https://astrocompute.wordpress.com/2015/12/08/vo-interfaces-at-the-csiro-askap-science-data-archive-casda/
