http://gaia.ac.uk/selected-gaia-science-alerts

The second testbed, D6.3 Deployment of first public science alerts prototype was made available in validation mode. It will be released as part of the full operational alert system towards the end 2015. This pause in operations of the photometric science alerts system (July-November 2015) was to allow for the implementation of enhancements to the Alerts Pipeline, required to address issues arising in the alerts validation phase. For instance, the alerts pipeline is more robust to false positive alerts resulting from spurious detections by Gaia around bright stars.

http://gaia.ac.uk/selected-gaia-science-alerts

The second testbed, D6.3 Deployment of second public science alerts prototype was released as part of the full operational alert system in early 2016 [1]. This followed a pause in operations of the photometric science alerts system (July-November 2015) is to allow for the implementation of enhancements to the Alerts Pipeline, required to address issues arising in the alerts validation phase. For instance, the alerts pipeline is now more robust to false positive alerts resulting from spurious detections by Gaia around bright stars.

The third testbed, D6.3 Deployment of third public science alerts prototype, was released in Oct 2016. This included an improved suite of publishing tools. The Gaia Science Alerts Publisher is described in Delgado et al, 2016, PASP Proc ADASS XXVI. The alerts prototype has been releasing photometric alerts to the community from early 2016.

[1] See the alerts interface at http://gsaweb.ast.cam.ac.uk/alerts/

Gaia Alerts are currently only available through the alerts testbed at http://gsaweb.ast.cam.ac.uk/alerts/ . It is the intention to publish all alerts accumulated to date through the main Gaia archive at http://archives.esac.esa.int/gaia/ commencing with Gaia DR3.

The alerts prototype has been releasing photometric alerts to the community from early 2016. Improved publishing of alerts has been enabled by the publisher. Significant improvements have been undertaken in terms of functionality and usability of both the Alerts pages and the Alerts Marshall. This includes presenting Gaia available photometry for each candidate, together with the photometry at and post alert. Access is provided to information concerning follow-up observations of the alert, classification and user provide annotation and comments.

The Gaia Marshall has been developed to support the ground based follow-up observational campaign. It gives information for all Gaia alerts requiring follow-up and classification. Other pages in the drop-down list give more detail on individual alerts, organised by priority, and also for those previously classified. The Gaia Marshall is now in active use. A significant follow-up up community is actively exploiting Gaia Alerts.

Over the period of the GENIUS grant all Task 6.3 Science Alerts Testbed deliverables were achieved.

• • UCAM: Nicholas Walton, Arancha Delgado, Simon Hodgkin, Guy Rixon

• • UB: E. Masana, F. Figueras, C. Jordi
  • CSUC: A. Gil, J. Cambres, G. Roldan, Ricard de la Vega, , David Tur, Xavier Peralta, Pere Puigdomenech
  • UCAM: Nicholas Walton, Floor Van Leeuwen, Simon Hodgkin, Guy Rixon

WP6 - Support activities

• • CSUC

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7-SPACE-2013-1) under grant agreement n°606740.

T6.3: Yr1 Activity - Science alerts testbed [Months: 1-12]

Year one activity has involved an initial requirements analysis. The testbed involves the integration of the realtime alerts from the Gaia Alerts stream (from the Gaia/DPAC/CU5), for longer term curation within the Gaia Archive (developed through Gaia/DPAC/CU9 and GENIUS).

With the early operations of Gaia, the CU5 Gaia Alert stream has been activated, currently in a validation phase. See http://gaia.ac.uk/selected-gaia-science-alerts. This is the initial Gaia Alerts testbed - D6.2 Deployment of first public science alerts prototype.

The alerts prototype is now releasing photometric alerts to the community - with a significant followup campaing underway, obtaining ground based followup of the alerts in order to characterise the alerts (thus type then as supernova, flare stars, CV's etc).

No UCAM staff effort has been charged to GENIUS WP6 in Year 1.

T6.3: Yr2 Activity - Science alerts testbed [Months: 13-24]

T6.3: Yr3 Activity - Science alerts testbed [Months: 25-36]

T6.3: Yr4 Activity - Science alerts testbed [Months: 37-42]

600 - Support activities

The work is divided into three sub-work packages:

610 - Technical coordination (1 staff months): as described in 2.1 the management of this work package will be done in direct coordination with the GENIUS executive board, since the tasks included here are of a global nature and its supervision needs a global view of the project. The management of this work package will be carried out by J. Torra.

620 - Simulated catalogue data (17 staff months): the products of the project should be avail- able in time for the first release of Gaia data (around mid 2015, according to present plans) so they can be used for the actual archive at ESAC. At that stage the systems and tools should be fully tested. For this purpose this sub-workpackage is devoted to the provision of sim- ulated catalogues allowing to fill the database with realistic data that will allow the testing and development of the archive prototypes and the tools, and will also allow the test users to use the system in realistic conditions.

630 - Science alerts testbed (12 staff months): The Gaia flux-based science alert stream will be issued to the community through the science alert processing carried out at the Cambridge Photometric Data Processing Centre (DPCI). The science alerts processing will issue ba- sic information for each flux alert via the VOEvent system to the community in a timely fashion (with alerts being produced 1–2 days after observation by Gaia). The alert packet will contain basic characterisation information for each event, including parameters such as estimated alert object type, and more advanced classification for certain objects such as su- pernovae (SNe). For these, inherent Gaia photometric data will be used to provide additional information concerning SNe alerts including class, epoch, redshift, reddening.

640 - Community portal infrastructure (12 staff months): The development and implementa- tion of the community portal, based on a personalization and customization of a content management system (like Drupal or similar), will be done following a user-centered design (UCD) methodology. Portal will include information about the project, documents, links to references, alerts, news, tutorials, etc. as well as all the necessary contents that will be defined in the first steps of the portal analysis. In addition, the basic infrastructure to host the portal will be delivered, also the consequent maintenance of the needed software and hardware.

T6.1 - Technical coordination [Months: 1-42

UB

As described in 2.1 the management of this work package will be done in direct coordination with the GENIUS executive board, since the tasks included here are of a global nature and its supervision needs a global view of the project. The management of this work package will be carried out by J. Torra.

T6.2 - Simulated catalogue data [Months: 1-42]

CESCA , UB

The products of the project should be available in time for the first release of Gaia data (around mid 2015, according to present plans) so they can be used for the actual archive at ESAC. At that stage the systems and tools should be fully tested. For this purpose this sub-work package is devoted to the provision of simulated catalogues allowing to fill the database with realistic data that will allow the testing and development of the archive prototypes and the tools, and will also allow the test users to use the system in realistic conditions. These simulations will be generated by the already available Gaia simulator, and specifically by a tool named GOG (Gaia Object Generator). GOG has been developed at the University of Barcelona in the context of the DPAC CU2 and has been providing simulated catalogue data to the DPAC for several years. Its development will continue at the UB at least until 2015 and will be used by the UB team to generate the mock-up catalogues until then. These catalogues can be shared for the DPAC development or specifically generated for GENIUS as needed. The GOG team at the UB under the supervision of the work package manager will take the responsibility for these simulations. The running of the simulations will take place at CESCA. This center provides supercomputing resources on which the Gaia simulator has already been run on many occasions. These resources, including the hardware and technical support, will be provided in this case to ensure the availability of simulated data for testing in GENIUS. We envisage to provide three major deliveries, listed below, of full mock-ups of the Gaia catalogue (one billion objects), although smaller partial catalogues for small scale testing will be generated on an as-needed basis. These simulations will be conducted using the hardware and software at CESCA. For this purpose CESCA has several supercomputers with different architectures which will allow running the software needed to carry out these simulations. As an example CESCA will provide a SGI UV 1000, which is a shared-memory machine with 224 processors, for a total of 1,344 processing cores. It has 6.14 TB of memory and 112 TB of disk storage. CESCA will also provide, through the supercomputing team, the necessary technical support in order to make the most optimal use of the available hardware and software. Suffice it to say that this is a team of experienced professionals who have been involved with Gaia project since 2000

T6.3 - Science alerts testbed [Months: 1-42]

UCAM

The Gaia flux-based science alert stream will be issued to the community through the science alert processing carried out at the Cambridge Photometric Data Processing Centre (DPCI). The science alerts processing will issue ba- sic information for each flux alert via the VOEvent system to the community in a timely fashion (with alerts being produced 1–2 days after observation by Gaia). The alert packet will contain basic characterisation information for each event, including parameters such as estimated alert object type, and more advanced classification for certain objects such as supernovae (SNe). For these, inherent Gaia photometric data will be used to provide additional information concerning SNe alerts including class, epoch, redshift, reddening. The testbed work to be carried out in WP-630 will develop the interfaces required to connect the real time science alerts classification processing to the main Gaia data products. Thus, as the mission evolves, and more knowledge is accumulated about objects measured by Gaia as it successively scans the sky, there will be opportunity to cross reference new alerts against previous knowledge of that sky point as well as previous alerts against new information. Thus for instance, irregular outburst events may show multiple times during the Gaia mission. Identification will be improved through correlation with earlier Gaia knowledge. The testbed will in addition provide linkages to external data resources provided through GENIUS, in particular via interfaces to the archive development through WP300. Finally the alerts testbed will plugin to the portal testbed developed in WP720. With the termination of the GENIUS WP630 testbed activity, the full functionality will be deployed for community use - providing enhanced access to science alert data from 2015 onwards.

1. The provision of simulated data mimicking the actual Gaia catalogue; this mock-up data will be used for testing the system, from technical tests to user trials for validation.

2. The provision of a testbed for science alerts; the prototypes of the science alerts system will be installed in it for testing and validation and made accessible to the test users.

3. The development and implementation of the basic infrastructure for the community portal (hardware, content management system, design, etc.).

• • UCAM

600 - Science exploitation testbed

Description

1. The provision of simulated data mimicking the actual Gaia catalogue; this mock-up data will be used for testing the system, from technical tests to user trials for validation.
2. The provision of an archive testbed system; the prototypes of the archive will be installed in it for testing and validation of the system and made accessible to the test users. The testbed will be installed at CESCA.

Participants

• Manager: J. Torra (UB)
• Partners:
  • UB
  • CESCA

Role of CESCA and Intersystems

• Edinburgh will be developing the archive system and, based on the current ESAC work, a serious contender for the database engine and some exploitation tools will be Intersystems. Therefore I propose that they provide two licenses (one for development at Edinburgh and another for the CESCA testbed) plus support for the work (intensive at start up and during heavy load testing, and regular mail/phone support the rest of the time)
• The role of CESCA would be to provide a testbed where the system developed at Edinburgh can be installed so the rest of GENIUS participants and other uses can carry on tests of their tools or simply use the database as scientists. This will require some small-medium setup for most of the time, plus some large disk space and system towards the end if we want to do tests with full data and heavy usage

600 - Support activities

This work package groups several support activities needed for the development of the tasks in the rest of WPs: This includes:

• The products of the project should be available in time for the first release of Gaia data (around mid 2015, according to the present previsions) so they can be used for the actual archive at ESAC. At such stage the systems and tools should be fully tested. For this purpose a specific work-package is devoted to the provision of simulated data for testing and development. These simulations can be provided by the groups already working in this task in the frame of the DPAC consortium.
• In order to integrate and test the system developed and its associated tools a hardware testbed is needed. This testbed will not be purchased but rather the resources of a computing centre hosting the suitable hardware (storage, nodes and database system) will be hired in an “as-needed” basis. This will give more flexibility, allowing to adapt the resources to the evolution of the development.

• The technological expertise of some leading companies of the IT sector will be injected in the project through the hiring of consultancy or support services from them.

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