IRIS: Expanding Data Lake Access Services at CASU / IRIS hardware allocation grant for FY19 for IoA, Cambridge University

CASU has had an initial resource allocation through IRIS to deploy science survey team user access to CASU held digital sky survey data. The machinery through IRIS is hosted at the University of Cambridge's West Cambridge Data Centre. The initial deployment allows authenticated access to any IRIS user to public optical imaging data.

This proposal will allow for a ramp up of the service to provide access to all public VISTA, VST and UKIRT imaging and associated catalogues data available at CASU, allowing dynamic and flexible user access to both the pixels and objects. The interface is to users is provided via python notebook servers, and allows programmatic access to the data. A range of example python notebooks are provided to enable an 'on-ramp' for non expert users, providing for instance access to an image cut out service. We will develop the documentation and software tools to make accessing and working with the data easier.

Refer to the Business Case for eInfrastructure for the exploitation of the UK National Facilities and STFC Frontier Science programme

This will benefit the IRIS consortium and therefore will impact all STFC scientists using the eInfrastructure supported by IRIS

The impact is fully described in the Business Case for eInfrastructure for the exploitation of the UK National Facilities and STFC Frontier Science programme.

In summary the e-Infrastructure, including software infrastructure, will

- Provide badly needed additional resources for all STFC data intensive science communities undertaking science supported by PPAN and the National Facilities, thus enabling more science output.

- Address the STFC need to harmonise computing across STFC as called for by its Computing Strategy.

- Pilot engagement with UK industry in the provision of cloud based resources.

- Aid STFC in its need to move towards a National e-Infrastructure for research across Research Councils.