Hardware

OIR computing resources are mostly distributed on users' desktops, some Suns, some Linux, some Windows. A variety of disks and tape drives are attached to these units, mostly for private use.

The CF makes available a wide variety of tape drives: Exabytes, DDS, DLT and AIT-3. Consult the CF page:

http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/cf/ref/devices.html

Through OIR, the TDC makes available a computer for the reduction of ground-based telescope data of all types. This machine is named tdc and is a SunFire V880 with 8 750 MHz cpus, 32 GB of memory, and a Gigabit Ethernet connection. See the V880 overview for more system-specific information.

The tdc computer is open for use by anyone with a CF-domain account, and that has telescope data to reduce. For more information, see the Web page:

http://tdc-www.harvard.edu/tdc_resources.shtml

The CF runs the publicly-available cfa0 computer which is identical to tdc except for the size of its directly-connected scratch disk space. See:

http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/cf/ref/System_Resources/public_computers.html

Software

Some non-CF-supported software is available via the tdc computer. For many of these programs, it is necessary to include /data/oiropt/bin in your PATH environment variable.

Note that the /data/oiropt directory is an architecture-dependent mountpoint, such that a Linux system gets Linux-appropriate binaries, and a Solaris system gets SunOS-appropriate biaries.

Magellan raw data archive

There is a summary table for data in the Magellan Archive that PI's can check to see if their data is archived. See the file:

 /data/Magellan/AAAreadme

Catalog searching

There are many catalogs and software search programs to make World Coordinate fits, finder charts, etc.

Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS - DR5 soon DR6)

A useful (still large) subset of the Sloan DR5 photometric and spectral databases has been installed at CFA as Starbase tables. Click here for more details on using this resource.

The DR6 release, of 07/2007 is in the process of being converted and should be available within two weeks of this writing.

Starbase

This is an RDB-type database manager created by John Roll. Include /data/oiropt/starbase near the beginning of your PATH environment variable.

The Starbase documents give an overview of the system.

Funtools

Fits Users Need Tools - software to ease the manipulation of FITS files in C programming.

CF-supported software

The tdc computer is managed by the Computation Facility with all their supported software available.

Still Other local documentation:

See the OIR local documentation web page.

Disk storage

There are several places to store data:

1. /data/oirperm   /data/oirperm2

   Two ``permanent'' storage spaces for any in OIR once you're added to the group oirgroup. Files are never deleted and are backed up nightly by the CF. You make your own dir in /data/oirperm{,2} and away you go. Please do not use this space for ordinary data reduction.

2. P.I. disks (various)

   There are PI disks, also permanent and usually backed up. If you don't already know of such a disk, the owner probably doesn't want you to use it.

3. Scratch disks

   Scratch disks are intended for data reduction, not permanent storage. Scratch disks are not backed up, and are purged after 90 days.

   /pool/tdc3       /pool/tdc5    /pool/megascr1

   These are high-performance RAID arrays (multiple disks combined so as to appear to the user as one disk) attached to the computer tdc, but also available via NFS. They are intended for use by CFA staff & students for ground-based telescope data reduction. Anyone can make directories there (i.e. no group restrictions), except /pool/megascr1 is restricted to members of megagrp. They are purged each week of files older than 90 days. They are not backed up, but are protected internally by parity and hot-spare disks in the RAID arrays.