2010-10-13-13h-14m: download this report as PDF

This is month 3 of the project.

Link to the Deliverables Table

Deliverables due at the end of this reporting period: D1.07, D1.08, D4.04, D5.01

The main activity of the past month was the Board Meeting. The meeting was hosted by our colleagues at Manchester University. Additional details of the meeting are available on the wiki. The wiki page includes the agenda and links to the presentations.

We are currently working on producing minutes to the meeting. Once they are ready, they will be posted online as well.

Work continues between the various partners and the project office regarding the consortium agreement. There was a very useful and constructive discussion during the Board Meeting where many of the parties were able to express their specific concerns (and lack of concerns) over portions of the text. It is believed that we are in a good position to move forward once the discussed changes are put into place.

This month we received official correspondence from the Commission indicating that our project officer would change to Jarkko Siren (from Jean-Luc Dorel). We acknowledged the receipt of the letter and have already been in contact with Siren in person and electronically.

We would like to extend our thanks to Dorel for the support and guidance provided during the EXPReS Project and wish him success with his new projects.

Immediately after the Board Meeting, Charles participated in a portion of the EVN Symposium <www.jb.man.ac.uk/meetings/evn2010/>. The Board Meeting was purposefully scheduled to coincide with the symposium to improve participation and ease some of the travel logistics. After this meeting, Charles traveled to Brussels for ICT 2010 <http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/events/ict/2010/index_en.htm> where he was able to catch some of the meeting and meet with several colleagues, most notably former project officers Dorel and Fabianek.

WP1 has no formal deliverables until the Period Review in month 12. However, we are tracking the progress of the deliverables from all of the work packages. Please note that there are discussions within the management team indicating the WP6's first milestone will be late. See the WP's section below for additional information.

The Project Office supports WP2 and WP3. Meetings for these two work packages are now being investigated. We currently are investigating existing meetings to which these smaller meetings might be paired.

Board Meeting- see the meeting's wiki page for details and summary above.

http://www.jive.nl/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=nexpres:board_meeting_kickoff_meeting_20_september_2010

EGI Technical Forum <www.egi.eu/EGITF2010>

Charles was approahced to give a talk at the EGI Technical Forum in Amsterdam. Due to the audience, it seemed that Mark Kettenis would be the more appropriate speaker, given his status as WP7 work package leader. Mark's session (https://www.egi.eu/indico/contributionDisplay.py?contribId=240&sessionId=31&confId=48) is listed online but does not link to a presentation. He may link the presentation from his wiki at a later point.

The members of eVSAG are identified, and a first informal meeting was held in Manchester on September 21st 2010 (during the IX EVN Symposium being held there).

There are no deliverables to be produced at this time.

No meetings were expected at this time.

The eVSAG goals were presented by the coordinator (F. Colomer) at the first NEXPReS Board Meeting held in Manchester on September 20th 2010. The most important issue discussed was that of membership to the group.

We are creating with professional artists an iconic image illustrating NEXPReS's goals and activities. It will be used as the basis for D4.4 (display), D4.5 (visual guide/elements), D.4.6 (print items I) and D4.7 (print items II) to create a unified visual identity for the project.

D4.4 (display) was due in month 3. The design has been sent to the printer for manufacture and will debut at the 9th Annual e-VLBI Workshop in Perth, Australia, in October (month 4). Click here for a larger PDF.

Work on deliverable D5.1, Mixed e-VLBI/recorded-VLBI at stations, has finished. A complete re-write of the Mark5 control code was implemented and tested. Some additional tests are needed, and once the EVN board has given permission this service can be offered to the community. A first draft of D5.3, Definition of specifications monitoring and remote control, was written and distributed for comments. D5.2, Metrics, selection criteria and user feedback will be delayed somewhat, as a result of the project starting during the vacation period and the lack of available manpower. A delay of no more than 1 to 2 months is expected.

* EXPReS and NEXPReS, the future of European VLBI A. Szomoru, 4th RadioNet Engineering Forum Workshop, Aveiro, Portugal, 3 September, 2010

* EXPReS and NEXPReS, the future of European VLBI A. Szomoru, The 10th European VLBI Network Symposium and EVN Users Meeting, Manchester, 20-24 September 2010

* First proof of concept of remote attendance for future observation strategies between Wetzell (Germany) and Concepcion (Chile) Martin Ettl et al., Poster presented at The 10th European VLBI Network Symposium and EVN Users Meeting, Manchester, 20-24 September 2010

On 2010-09-20, prior to the NEXPReS board meeting, we held a WP6 face-to-face meeting at Manechester University. Attendees were Ralph Spencer (UMAN), Neal Jackson (UMAN), Richard Hughes-Jones (DANTE), Tasso Tzioumis (ATNF), Lars Fischer (Nordunet), Charles Yun (JIVE) and Paul Boven (JIVE). We discussed project preparations and especially the work needed for writing MS601.

At the NEXPReS board meeting, Paul Boven (WP6 activity leader) presented an overview of the objectives and tasks of WP6.

Work has started on MS601, but the amount of work needed for it, and the late start of the project, means that we will not be able to have it completed at the end of month 4.

See above

Slides of presentation at the Nexpres board meeting on 2010-09-20

At JIVE work on the correlator requirements document is continuing. We're focussing on getting a preliminary draft out that explains the EVN correlation process. Details on how to run the SFXC software correlator will follow later.

At OSO work continued on gathering information on telescope operations. Information was presented at WP7 meeting in Manchester.

At PSNC work on the design of the Workflow Manager continued:

The Workflow Manager is planned to be used to control and manage a transparent distributed correlation platform. It will be also used by the telescope and correlator operators in order to automate this process as much as possible. We have started a work with the survey on the workflow languages and existing engines for that languages which could be used for our purposes. We have examined about 15 languages taking into consideration aspects like: node's types , data types, loops, conditions, etc. We have also checked whether a language is widely used ( has a community). We have also searched for the existence of libraries in a different programming languages and finally workflow engines - software which is capable of managing and executing a given workflow.

As a result of this activities a comparison table has been prepared, which summarizes all the workflow languages according to the features mentioned above. This will help us to choose a workflow language which will be used in the NEXPReS to build a tool to manage a distributed correlation indrastructure.

The current work focuses on the exploration of Media Object Markup Language (MOML).

Work on deliverables D7.1, D7.2 and D7.3 is continuing.

A first face-to-face meeting happened in Manchester on September 20th, the morning before the board meeting. During these meeting, representatives from JIVE, OSO and PSNC gave presentations about the work they plan to do. After these presentations discussions about some aspects of the workflow took place, followed by a discussion on how to set up global real-time correlation.

Presentations can be found on the project WiKi.

NEXPReS, M.M. Kettenis, EGI Technical Forum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 14 September 2010