GeminiFocus 2015 Year in Review | Page 64

January 2016 Paul Hirst The New Cloud-based Gemini Observatory Archive The new Cloud-based Gemini Observatory Archive is now online and available to our user community and anyone wanting to retrieve Gemini data. The new archive has many powerful tools and features that are described here — take it for a test-drive! The new Gemini Observatory Archive (GOA) provides a simple yet powerful way for the Gemini user community (especially those who wish to write scripts) to search for and download data. A key feature of the new Cloud-based archive is its ability to automatically find and match optimal calibration data for your search results. GOA’s powerful web interface also allows bookmarking search results and provides an easy-to-use Application Programmer Interface (API). As I write these words, I have one eye monitoring several windows in the corner of my computer screen, which shows that our new archive server is running quietly and smoothly. One window shows me that afternoon calibrations are being taken on Gemini North, and I see those data files transferring into the archive. More than a hundred users have already created accounts on the system and I see them accessing proprietary data for their projects; more users are accessing the server anonymously, either to just check out the system, or search for older data. The Gemini Observatory Archive can be accessed here. Data Management Dilemma Shortly after I started working at Gemini in late 2006, I realized we had a problem with in-house data management: data were being manually copied between different disks and backup media in a somewhat ad hoc manner. In addition, a disk failure on an aged Sun workstation left us scrabbling to locate backup copies of some Near-infrared Integral Field Spectrometer engineering data that had been lost. The final straw came as an urgent phone call from the night crew who needed to free up disk space for incoming data, but they weren’t 100% sure that the data they wanted to delete was safely on another disk or even in the archive. 62 GeminiFocus 2015 Year in Review January 2016