Meeting Notes for 26 March 2008 Talking Points Release of Refactored Code Blockers Release timing Status of CMS Status of LIGO Bug Report Form

Meeting Notes for 26 March 2008

Present: Liz, Tom J., Mihael, Eric (showed up late, after his class)
Absemt: Dan K, Mike W., Randy, Kris, Tom L., Joao, Bob, Marge

Talking Points

We discussed Marge's talking points.

Release of Refactored Code

Blockers

Mihael believes that he has solved all the blocking bugs. We will move one of the items under searching posters to a new bug since it is not really a blocker.

Release timing

We decided to wait until Bob gets back before releasing. Releasing means changing the list of computers available for www.i2i2.org to go to to just www18. We should also put up a news items when we do this.

Status of CMS

Mihael is integrating the code Dan wrote to convert it for use in the portal (i.e., from PHP to jsp). Currently the OGRE URL used by students directly.

Ben is working on a general way to access data that may apply to our project.

Status of LIGO

Tom L. has 20 Students doing a pilot test activity: Making a map of LIGO seismometer sensitivity by mining USGS data, identifying those USGS-identified earthquakes which are clearly visible in the LIGO seismic data, and creating a google map where color tags indicate earthquake magnitude. This is an example of a large-scale, democratized science project which e-Labs can make possible; hundreds of students will be able to do this.

Eric is working on interface between LIGO analysis tool (Bluestone) and Swift . He has task execution and progress monitoring now working via an API which uses HTTP POST, but so far just to run a "local" task. He's going to extend this to submit a task to Swift using HTTP POST. Mihael has already put the task submission and progress pages in place, so Eric just has to connect to them. One potential problem is the apparent need to authenticate to the Swift page which monitors the task, which might require changes on Mihael's side.

Eric points out that the way Mihael and he have done this demonstrates "robustness" of our software and approach: while the Swift side is written on JSP and runs on a Tomcat server, Bluestone is written in PHP and runs on an Apache server. Yet via this interface the two will be able to work together, without the user knowing all the details involved. Similar combination could be possible, for example, between Swift and ATLAS code, since ATLAS prefers to use Python for scripting. This would also obviate the need for Mihael to convert DanK's PHP code into jsp; If we could give Dan the API specs then he could easily modify OGRE to submit tasks to Swift this way, and still be able to maintain and improve OGRE in PHP.

In response to a question from Marge about LIGO progress, Eric pointed out continued interest (his and the LIGO team generally) in working on collaboration tools that can support an interactive community. We already have 3 wikis: this CI wiki for the developer notes (http://www.ci.uchicago.edu/wiki/bin/view/ELabs/WebHome) the "glossary" wiki (http://www13.i2u2.org/glossary/ - primarily used for LIGO technical terms and notes, but with some CMS content and room for expansion), and the QuarkNet Fellows Library wiki, (http://www13.i2u2.org/cosmic/library), which has primarily been used to share documents between the Fellows. At some point we should discuss further whether these last two should be separate, or merged, and discuss in general the read/edit/add policies for the various components as they apply to students, teachers, and developers.

According to Dale the "beta" version of Bluestone and the LIGO e-Lab is running with 250 students, who have used the site, primarily for data analysis and background materials.

Bug Report Form

Eric still has a little more work, but it is already very nice. Even so, TomJ thinks that we should not wait for the changes to release the refactored code, and that we should not yet link to the bug report form. So for now we will just ask people to email help@iu2u.org.

Bob needs to find places in the e-Lab to add appropriate links to the bug report form. And possibly tweak the form text.

Each of us should test the help email address to make sure it is working.

-- Main.LizQuigg - 26 Mar 2008
-- Main.EricMyers - 31 Mar 2008