THE UNITED KINGDOM INFRARED TELESCOPE
ANNUAL REPORT
2000

3.5. Computing

3.5.1. The New Millennium

The year 2000 of course had perhaps greater connotations for computing than for any other area of JAC operations; in the event, the turn of the year brought no problems (as a result of considerable planning, this was expected but nonetheless a relief). In practice, the only time lost to anything resembling a Y2K bug was lost on February 29th, when a quite unexpected overflow caused archiving problems. Most of the software effort in 2000 was devoted to the ORAC project; work on the new TCS interface was described in a §3.3.4.

3.5.2. ORAC

The ORAC project provides observation preparation and execution software, plus unified data reduction, for all UKIRT facility instruments. 2000 saw the completion of this project for UFTI, which was designed for ORAC, and CGS4 and IRCAM, which it was decided should be retrofitted to it at the end of 1999 (following experience with UFTI). Essentially all software effort in the first two quarters of 2000 went into preparation for the resulting ORAC ``Big Bang'' (and new TCS interface) release in May, and a subsequent further shake-down period between May and the start of Semester 00B. For a software delivery of this magnitude there were remarkably few problems, thanks to the effort of the ORAC project team at the ATC as well as local software staff and support scientists. On August 1st ORAC replaced all previous relevant UKIRT software. The system naturally required some bedding in; this was essentially complete by the end of the year.

One of the main JAC contributions to the ORAC system was the data-driven real-time reduction pipeline, which handles in a common way the data from all UKIRT instruments. As a fine example of the power of this system, we show polarimetry of the jet in M87 and the resulting oracdr-processed vector-overlay image (Leeuw et al.; see Figure 5).

Figure 5: Polarimetry of the jet in M87, courtesy of T. V. Cawthorne, L. Leeuw & E. I. Robson.

3.5.3. Staffing

The software groups at the JAC were restructured so that staff are line-managed on a skills, rather than a telescope, basis. In the long term we believe this will generate significant synergies by increased sharing of software between the two telescopes. The new groupings are essentially high-level and low-level software, covering observation preparation/reduction and instrument/telescope control respectively. The existing Computer Services Group handles data archiving from both telescopes. This change was formally implemented on December 1st. The reorganization required the creation of a new post, the Instrumentation and Telescope Group Manager. This post was advertised and interviews held in December. The successful candidate was Craig Walther, who brings to the JAC 20 years experience working in a very similar environment at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) at Boulder.

3.5.4. Projects

With the major efforts being put into completion of Michelle at the ATC, an increasing amount of effort was, by year-end, being put into liaison with the Michelle project team over the required major upgrade of our existing software, such that a common code base can be maintained for the shared software components.