Lasair Cycle-4 mid-Project Review: Public Page

Purpose and Goals

We are mid-way through the LSST:UK Phase B project. In Cycles 1-2-3 we have concentrated on prototyping, technology, and experiments; in Cycles 5-6-7 we will start the real build; the aim of Cycle-4 has been to take stock in preparation for that build phase. This is a light touch review; the aim is to summarise and share where we have got to, discuss remaining issues, and feed into an updated long term plan document.

Review status of Lasair
Review delivered functionality
Review technical and design decisions
How do we transition from ZTF to LSST?

Code of Conduct

This meeting will adhere to the LSST:UK Code of Conduct. Please take a moment to familiarise yourself with this.

Place/Date

Sept 8th 1300-1800 BST
Zoom Link (fReFz0LZ)

Resulting meeting notes and actions

Session-1: Overviews (chair: Roy Williams)
1300: Welcomes
1305: LSST:UK context (Stephen Smartt)
1315: Lasair long term plan (Andy Lawrence)
1325: Discussion

Session-2: ZTF prototype experience (chair: Stephen Smartt)
1335: Lasair-ZTF and how it works (Roy Williams)
1345: Science experience with ZTF (Matt Nicholl)
1355: Differences between ZTF and LSST (Eric Bellm)
1405: Discussion

1420: 15 minute break

Session-3: Architecture and Technology (chair: Andy Lawrence)
1435: Lasair-LSST Architecture (Roy Williams)
1445: Kafka processing (Gareth Francis/Roy Williams)
1455: Hardware implementation (Roy Williams)
1505: Light curve classification (Michael Fulton)
1515: Discussion

Session-4 Science processing and functionality (chair: Meg Schwamb)
1530: Adding value: Sherlock (Dave Young)
1540: Annotation, features (Roy Williams)
1550: Databases and storage : SQL, Cassandra, CephFS (Ken Smith)
1600: Classification with FINK (Julien Peloton)
1610: Multi-messenger science with AMPEL (Jakob Nordin)
1620: Discussion

1635: 15 minute break

Session-5: User Interface (chair: Dave Young)
1650 Queries, streaming, mining (Roy Williams)
1700 Web interface (Andy Lawrence)
1710 API and notebooks (Ken Smith)
1720 Tools interface (Andy Lawrence)
1730: Discussion

Session-6: Remaining questions / wrap up discussion
1745: Discussion

1800: Carriages

Reading

Below we supply a fairly comprehensive set of background material. Team members will be familiar with all this. Other attendees are not expected to read it all - its there for reference if you want it. If you read only one thing in advance, read this:
Community Broker proposal (Dec 2020)
and maybe take a look at the latest version of the top-level architecture

lasair.roe.ac.uk is the official public version of the ZTF prototype (Lasair 2.0), from Mar 2020

lasair-iris.roe.ac.uk is officially the “tech preview” (Lasair 3.0) advertised to limited users, but has become the de facto new public version of the ZTF prototype

Reference material

LSST:UK project documents

LSST:UK Phase B proposal
LSST:UK Science Requirements Document (D1.2.1) (Mar 2020)
LSST:UK long term plan (D1.1.1) (Mar 2020 update)
Lasair top level plan (Oct 2019)
Lessons learned from ZTF prototype (D2.3.1) (Nov 2020)

Lasair-ZTF prototype

Lasair project discussions

Annotations for Lasair Objects
Notes on ZTF forced photometry

Rubin Project documents

Data Products Definition Document (LSE-163)
Plans and Policies for Alert Distribution (LDM-612)
LSST alerts: Key numbers (DMTN-102)
Performance of Cassandra-based APDB implementation (DMTN-156)
Review of Time Series Features: DMTN-118 (May 2021)

Some questions

We can discuss anything appropriate that comes up, but here is a list of specific questions from Roy and Gareth:

Light curve features
Large LSST feature list + what can we add for Lasair feature list?
Stephen recommends fitting SN curves, what else?
What can be fetched from USA?

What data to keep?
Most alerts have their LC in Cassandra + object in MySQL
But singleton and known Solar System have detection on Cassandra, not kept in MySQL

Are solar system objects part of the long term plan for Lasair?

How do we request forced photometry?
Which objects stimulate a request for FP?
How do we store the FP? Is is just like another LC?

How can we prototype the real LSST stream? Rate? Syntax?
Send the same Tb over and over?

How is LSST structurally different from ZTF?

Does the Annotation model line up with the Zooniverse one?

Participants

Externals
Eric Bellm
Matt Nicholl
Cosimo Inserra
Sarah Casewell
Julien Peloton
Jakob Nordin

Lasair Team
Roy WIlliams
Stephen Smartt
Andy Lawrence
Ken Smith
Gareth Francis
Dave Young
Meg Schwamb
Michael Fulton

LSST:UK
George Beckett
Terry Sloan
Stelios Voutsinas
Dave Morris