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Unlike the ALMA archive, the NRAO archive stages downloads before it allows access to them, meaning the files composing a file set are pulled from long term storage and assembled before presenting the option to download the files. This release of the NRAO Archive is hosted in NRAO's New Mexico facility, so staging ALMA files means streaming them from Virginia, which is not optimal. We plan to address this before the tool goes into production by hosting the download and reprocessing capabilities of ALMA data in Virginia and non-ALMA NRAO data in New Mexico.As a consequence requests take longer than users of the ALMA system might expect.
Reprocessing Errors
The NRAO Archive offers primitive re-processing capabilities, meaning it can re-run raw data files through the ALMA or NRAO calibration pipeline and allow downloading the results. These features are very much a work in progress, one area that needs improvement is error reporting, the Archive currently allows users to reprocess data sets that are known to be bad, and there is no feedback to the user except that the request is complete and produced no files to download.
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We will track bugs in Open JIRA. These should be reported to the 'SSA' Project and 'AAT/PPI' Component (not 'AAT, we use that for the current archive system). If it is easier you can submit a bug by emailing 'jira-ssa@nrao.edu'. We will also keep track of the more significant bugs in the Known Bugs section of this document, so new testers can be made aware of them.
Notes to the Users Committee
Please contact Mark Lacy (mlacy@nrao.edu) and Claire Chandler (cchandler@nrao.edu) to report bugs, ask about issues and make feature suggestions. The areas we'd like the most help testing is authentication and authorization.
- You shouldn't be able to reprocess an observation without logging in.
- If the observation is within the proprietary period, you should have to be a proposer to get access to it.
Note that metadata is public, you are only challenged to authenticate when you select a search result and attempt to do something with it.