ICAT at CLF

The Central Laser Facility at is a world class laser facility operated by STFC and located at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. With the help of the eScience department, ICAT is currently being evaluated as a service orientated architecture replacement for their current monolithic data service on the Astra-Gemini laser system.

A number of concerns were initially expressed around the performance of the ICAT system against Astra-Gemini required data turn-around-time. Put simply, in order to perform another laser shot, CLF operators must know how the last shot behaved. CLF operators like to shoot their laser every twenty seconds.

Over the past couple of months, the eScience team have systematically improved the performance of ICAT for the CLF use-case. This has included a doubling of data ingest rate and gaining a better understanding of ICAT on a virtualised platform.

There remain some benchmarks still to be performed but the results are encouraging. In future posts, I will share these results and learnings with you - but if you can't wait till then, contact me by email at firstname.lastname[at]stfc.ac.uk.

Second ICAT Developer Workshop

The second ICAT Developer Workshop will be held on Tuesday 23rd & Wednesday 24th March at the ILL, Grenoble.

The intention is to run from lunchtime on Tuesday 23rd to lunchtime on Wednesday 24th (two half days)

The meeting is to be focused on how sites and projects are using, or plan to use, ICAT and any changes they need or would like to see to the ICAT API, schema and interfaces.

The detailed agenda will depend on exactly who is able to attend, so if you are interested please could you let me know as soon as possible.

We have reserved 10 rooms at the ILL for external attendees, so could you also indicate if you require a room.

If you are interested in attending please contact tom.griffin@stfc.ac.uk

ICAT Developer Workshop slides and notes

The presentation slides and notes from the developer meeting held at The Coseners House, Abingdon are now available from http://www.isis.rl.ac.uk/dataanalysis/icat/1stICATWorkshop.htm

ICAT developer Workshop final agenda

ICAT developer Workshop
First Day – Tuesday 25 August 2009

0 Introduction Chairman: Tom Griffin

9h00 Welcome and Introduction to the Workshop Tom Griffin
9h15 ICAT Overview Tom Griffin
10h15 ICAT UI demo (Data Portal, TopCat skeleton) Michael Gleaves

10h30 Coffee Breaks

1 Clients / TopCat Session Chairman: Srikanth Nagella

11h00 TopCat Mockups Laurent Lerusse
11h30 TopCat Discussion All
12h00 What ICAT clients do we need? All

12h30 Lunch

2 Schema and Installation Chairman: Roger Downing

13h30 Schema Presentation Laurent Lerusse
14h00 DB installation and care Carmine Cioffi
14h30 ICAT API installation and care Roger Downing
15h00 Experience & Questions All

15h30 Coffee Breaks

3 Integration (now & planned) Chairman: Michael Gleaves

16h00 Integration ISIS Tom Griffin
16h20 Integration DLS Alun Astun
16h40 Integration ILL Jean-François Perrin
17h00 How to ease the process for future facilities?


18h30 Drinks and Diner



_________________________________________
Second Day – Wednesday 26 August 2009

4 Related projects Chairman: Laurent Lerusse

9h00 Consequence Shirley Crompton
9h30 DataMinx Peter Turner
10h00 neXus to anything – export functionality Stephane Poirier
10h20 neXus Visualization Mark Koennecke

10h40 Coffee Breaks

5 Next developments tasks Chairman: Tom Griffin

11h10 List of identified ICAT API tasks Tom Griffin
11h30 Discussion All

12h30 Lunch

6 Future Chairman: Michael Gleaves

13h30 Governance All
15h00 Summary of Actions Michael Gleaves
15h20 Conclusion, Next Meeting Tom Griffin

15h30 Coffee Breaks - End of the Workshop

ICAT Developer Workshop 25th & 26th August 2009

We welcome you to join a 2-day ICAT developer workshop to be held at Cosener's House, Abingdon, UK on the 25th & 26th August 2009.

A brief outline of the proposed agenda is described below. This will be refined in the coming weeks and we welcome your comments/suggestions in doing this.

Day 1 ---------------------------------------

Overview
What is ICAT?, Capabilities, Model (What information does ICAT store), Interaction Points (web services), Security

ICAT UI + demo
Demo, Architecture, Connection Steps, User mapping

Facility Integration & Maintenance
Users, Authentication, Proposal System, Data, Publications, Adding Instrument Scientists

Installation
Download bundle at code.google.com, Required software, Database installation, ICAT installation

Further development Roadmap and discussion

Day 2 ---------------------------------------
Development
Required software, Development guidelines, Define release cycle, Plan of action in light of further development discussion

Accommodation can also be booked at Cosener's House and there will be a dinner provided on the evening of Tuesday 25th of August. Please follow link below for information regarding room cost, location and other details:

http://www.scitech.ac.uk/About/Find/Coseners/Introduction.aspx

So far, the following people have registered an interest in attending this meeting. Please let me know if you would like to be added/removed from this list.

STFC - Michael Gleaves, Gordon Brown, Kier Hawker, Lakshmi Sastry, Srikanth Nagella, Shirley Crompton, Tom Griffin, Dan Badham
Diamond - Alun Ashton, Tobias Richter, Karl Levik, Mark Bashum, AN Other

ILL - Jean-François Perrin, Holger Gebhard + possibly 1 unknown

PSI - Simon Ebner, Mark Koennecke

University of Sydney - Peter Turner
Soleil - Stephane Poirier, Celine Marechal

Thanks!

Tom

ICAT 3.3.3 Released

This includes some incremental updates that have been available for download for a while now (but not tagged) including:

• Improved database installation (streamlined scripts for use with Oracle XE, population of sensible values for list tables, population of tables with test data)
  
• Default integration with internal plaintext database authentication rather than certificate based myproxy authentication used at STFC.
  
• Inclusion of icat3-xmlingest-client tool that can be modified at runtime to connect to any icat web-service location and submit metadata via xml (examples included)

The ICAT3.3.3 download has now also been updated so that the database installation automatically creates a schema for unit testing (testicat) which is used by the test subsystem in icat3-core. 

In order to run these unit tests in Netbeans (after performing the a new database installation and downloading  the latest src code) you simply need to run the TestAll class as shown in the diagram below.

This will instantiate the full suite of ICAT unit tests (which currently includes over 500 tests) that can be run repeatedly in order to detect if any changes that you make to the src code or underlying database have a knock on effect to other parts of the code-base.

Hopefully after running the tests you will see something like this:

:)

Subversion reorganisation

Just to let you all know that the code in the https://icatproject.googlecode.com/svn/ repository has been reorganised for the following reasons:

1) to include the full icat src tree including tags and branches that were previously missing
2) to include the history of commits that have been recorded thus far in the project



3) to organise some of the documentation so that it can be versioned more easily
4) to separate the Data Portal source code which really belongs in another repository since it is a project in its own right

Please check out a fresh version to avoid any complications.

Best,
Damian