| |
SolarSoft
http://www.lmsal.com/solarsoft/
S.L.Freeland, freeland@sxt1.lmsal.com, Last Revision:
10-November-1999
Related Documents
What is SolarSoft?The SolarSoft system is a set of integrated software
libraries, data bases, and system utilities which provide a common programming
and data analysis environment for Solar Physics. The SolarSoftWare (SSW) system
is built from Yohkoh, SOHO, SDAC and Astronomy
libraries and draws upon contributions from many members of those projects. It
is primarily an IDL based
system, although some instrument teams integrate executables written in other
languages. The SSW environment provides a consistent look and feel at widely
distributed co-investigator institutions to facilitate data exchange and to
stimulate coordinated analysis. Commonalities and overlap in solar data and
analysis goals are exploited to permit application of fundamental utilities to
the data from many different solar instruments. The use of common libraries,
utilities, techniques and interfaces minimizes the learning curve for
investigators who are analyzing new solar data sets, correlating results from
multiple experiments or performing research away from their home institution.
Some of the primary goals of the SSW are...
- Provide a large reuse SW library
- The software library represents an evolutionary system tracing back to
SMM, through Yohkoh and SOHO, TRACE, and eventually will incorporate SXI,
HESSI, and other solar observatories. Many common "solar physics" , file i/o,
system, IDL structure manipulation, data display, etc. tasks have already been
addressed by others (many others in some cases!)
Very small sample of existing SSW capabilities...
| Time series analysis, time conversions, UTPLOT (millennium
safe)
| | Spectral fitting
| | Image and Image cube (movies) display
| | IDL data manipulation (structure, string, array, mathematics...)
| | File I/O (generic binary, ascii), FITS
| | Solar (limb fitting, grid overlay, coordinate tranformations...)
| | WWW related (html conversion, file conversions, FORM handling, movie
making,...)
| | WWW Client<->SolarSoft IDL server interface
permits execution of SSW/IDL utilities over the Web Examples include SXT dynamic WWW movie
maker and WWW GOES
X-Ray light curve display | WWW index which allows
searching for SSW routines by category and/or string pattern is available.
- Provide a system which is largely hardware-system and site
independent
- Installation and setup utilities simplify tranportation to systems.
Fundamental shared software is written in hardware-independent and
site-configuration independent form. The SSW setup utilities support local
configuration files to get sites up and running
- Promote the use of certain standards which facilitate coordinated data
analysis
- Through use of suggested standards, many powerful routines are immediately
available for the analysis of new data sets.
The SSWsuggested
Keywords and Tags descibes pointing and time standards. Application for overlay, alignment, scaling, rotation, etc of any
SSW instruments via Dominic Zarro's Mapping
software
- Promote an evolutionary environment
- Feedback and contributions from the many SSW institutes and users are
strongly encouraged. Utilties to simplify remote SSW
upgrades and accept user contribution are designed to make the system
evolutionary instead of stagnant and divergent.
- Provide access to supporting ancillary data bases
- Access to supporting data sets from ground-based and satellite-based solar
observatories are provided in consistent formats to facilitate coordinated
analysis
- Provide a file-format independent analysis environment
- To accomodate the largest number of solar data sets, file I/O is isolated
and analysis applications are designed to operate on objects which are
independent of file type.
- Provide integrated access to other IDL packages
- When IDL libraries are identified which provide a useful extension to SSW
capabilities, we will attempt to integrate them into the SSW system. For
example, the Chianti
Package, K. Dere et al. is now fully integrated into the SSW
distribution and analysis environment for UV/EUV emission line analysis.
A "typical" SSW installation is looks something like... SSW
|
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| | | | | |
SITE GEN SOHO YOHKOH (...missions...) (...packages...)
(SSW) | |
-------------------- ------------------
| | | | | | | | | |
GEN EIT LASCO CDS [etc] GEN SXT BCS HXT WBS
(soho) (yohkoh)
The "GEN" branches contain general purpose (IDL, setup) which are
applicable to branches below - thus the SSW-GEN contains globally useful
routines (instrument/mission independent) and the MISSION-GEN contain routines
which are mission dependent but may be used by all instruments within the
mission (mission pointing, epehermeris, etc). The SITE directory is available
for local SW and definition of SSW environmentals/logicals in terms of local
pathnames.
The SSW installation procedure and system design allows local configurations
which contain a subset of this tree - thus, an EIT/SXT/Chianti
only installation is ok and would look like... SSW
|
-------------------------------------------------
| | | | |
SITE GEN SOHO YOHKOH PACKAGES
| | |
---- ---- Chianti
| | | |
GEN EIT GEN SXT
SSW setup startup utilities define the IDL environment based upon users
SSW instrument selection. (not shown are links to Astronomy and other IDL
libraries which are added by the SSW startup)
freeland@penumbra.nascom.nasa.gov
|