Tinkertoys (Jun 04 2009)

A day full of troubleshooting. Still trying to get one of these Intel servers up - everything in the system works except the hardware RAID. We got the new drives in the mail today, but still can't get into the RAID bios. We do have a card we know works in another Intel server which we'll swap in sometime but we're tabling this project in general for now...

That's because Dan and a bunch of the CASPAR students are down at Arecibo to install their new SERENDIP V data recorder. They'd like to test it while they are there, of course, which means comparing its functionality with our recorder, as well as do some observations of the Crab Nebula to run through Astropulse, etc. What does that mean for us? That means we really need to get our SETI@home data recorder SATA drives/enclosures working. They have been off line for well over a month now, but now that we have our own people with immediate access to the machine it's speeding up the debugging process. Still, there are plenty of mysteries that seem impossible to figure out. Jeff's frustration with SATA/USB/drivers/linux is palpable coming all the way from the other side of the room. In fact I just heard him tell the gang down there to install a new OS on the system (the current OS is ancient, and quite possibly the source of our woes).

Meanwhile Jeff and I are continue to tinker with NTPCkr stuff. I've been trying to optimize the NTPCkr page, finding that it spends most of its time parsing the XML of the zillion multiplets (groups of similar signals) within each candidate. So at this late hour we may change how we divide the multiplets up into "barycentric" (tight in frequency space) and "non-barycentric" and just score them according to frequency tightness. This may not only yield far less multiplets, but they may be ranked better as far as how interesting they are. There's gonna be more tweaking/testing on that front.

- Matt

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-- BOINC/SETI@home network/web/science/development person
-- "Any idiot can have a good idea. What is hard is to do it." - Jeanne-Claude

Matt: Thanks, as ever, for the update. The time you spend putting these pieces together is well justified, believe me.
This may be completely off the wall but the phrase "parsing XML" set alarm bells ringing with me. A couple of years ago I was using script to migrate XML data files between financial systems and using standard programming language to do this took over 3 days to process the file (well, actually, there were 14 max size Excel sheets of data). Using XSLT to do the same thing brought the whole process down to less than an hour. Just wondering if you are using transformation where appropriate - or it may not be appropriate at all and me talking out of the fundamental orifice?

F.
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... Jeff's frustration with SATA/USB/drivers/linux is palpable coming all the way from the other side of the room. In fact I just heard him tell the gang down there to install a new OS on the system (the current OS is ancient, and quite possibly the source of our woes). ...