From al@roe.ac.uk Thu Jan 29 07:27:38 2004 Date: Tue, 27 Jan 2004 08:24:02 -0000 From: Andrew Lawrence To: "'ivoa@ivoa.net'" Subject: AstroGrid Report to IVOA Dear all here is the Astrogrid report for the IVOA meeting. (I sent it on Sunday from my home emai address, which bounced !) andy lawrence AstroGrid Project : report to IVOA, January 2004. -------------------------------------------------- AstroGrid is now twelve months into a two year Phase B programme, following a fifteen month Phase A study. This means we have spent roughly 60% of our budget. We have been concentrating on the basic engine room components of the Virtual Observatory - Registry, Workflow, MySpace, Authentication and Authorisation, Data Access, Portal. We have a rudimentary user interface, but this should develop rapidly as we have a "harness" based round Cocoon that should make it easy to plug in new components. We have put no effort into new user tools, instead adapting existing tools, or ones developed by other VO projects. Everything is written in Java and related technologies, browser based, and server centred. This means that data centres, or departments hosting a "community" may need to install software, but end-users need only a standard browser. We are designing the components so that they are mix-and-match, and more or less plug-and-play, and want to encourage other projects to do likewise, so that national VO projects around the world can build systems from mixtures of AstroGrid or AVO or NVO components etc just as they please, and can easily customise the result. The main AstroGrid software is written using industry-standard technologies such as SOAP, WSDL, Cocoon etc, along with IVOA standards such as VOTable and ADQL. However we are keeping up a parallel R&D stream testing Grid technology, for example accessing databases through OGSA-DAI. We had hoped that in year two we would re-engineer using grid services, but it is not clear that the technology is stable enough to base the whole system on. Our current plan is therefore to have a separate "Grid Data Warehouse" situated on the UK e-science Grid and accessed through a gateway. We are running the project using an iterative and incremental process, in quarterly cycles, with new workgroups each quarter. By and large this has been very successful, but it has been very hard integrating components. We have been developing an automated testing and integration system based around Maven, and hope soon to be running nightly builds. There are no real users yet, but we have set up an AstroGrid Science Advisory Group (AGSAG) which has regular meetings but also constitutes a pool of beta-testers. We recently got official news from PPARC on our continuation project, AstroGrid-2. This has secured funding through to 2007, but at a slightly reduced level. As with the original AstroGrid, we are expecting to devote a significant part of our effort to the European project, Euro-VO. A funding proposal to the EU in March will also hopefully augment Euro-VO funding over and above the expected national contributions. Andy Lawrence