SDSS Data Consolidation and Support

The essential activity is to support the consolidated hosting and management of the data from the various Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) projects.  There are 3 separate but concurrent and interrelated streams of activity:

  1. SDSS2: Transfer all the DAS and supporting data from Fermi National Labs to JHU by May 2014, including transferring ownership of the website, and help desk operations. Integral to this is providing the hardware to support the data volumes and access requirements, as well as taking up and supporting the FNAL CASJobs/MyDB environment.
  2. SDSS3: JHU is already supporting the CAS data, but the project itself ends at the end of 2014, and there will be a requirement for JHU to also take on board the DAS and supporting raw data, CASJobs/MyDB and help desk support during 2015. Activities will be put in place to facilitate that later transfer ahead of time – early planning, data transfer, specification of precise storage requirements, configuration of CASJobs environment at JHU etc.  Post SDSS3 project, we will then plan to merge the websites and ‘identities’ of SDSS2 and SDSS3 into one entity, along with unifying help desk support.
  3. SDSS4: This is a new project coming on line approximately July 2014. JHU will serve to host and support the CAS data, just like SDSS3. There is no requirement to host the DAS, website or run the help desk. In this regard we won’t be able to “formally” unify SDSS4 with SDSS2 and 3 from a public facing perspective, however since we will be taking up SDSS4 from its inception and at the time at which we will have started or even completed the first stage of core re-engineering of CASJobs and data storage, we will take SDSS4 data on directly into the new environment which will be common and shared with SDSS2 and SDSS3, and data will thus be made available seamlessly with the two legacy sets regardless. This will then make an SDSS4 migration of data to JHU at the end of that project a trivial task in comparison.