SPEDASSlide − 1GEM June 19, 2014 SPEDAS: A framework for supporting multi- mission data analysis and visualization

SPEDAS Slide − 1 GEM June 19, 2014

SPEDAS: A framework for supporting multi-mission data analysis and visualization


SPEDASOrganization Contributors

UC Berkeley D Larson, H Frey, J Bonnell, J McFadden, A Keiling

J McTiernan, B Sadeghi, N Hatzigeorgiu, J Lewis

UCLA V Angelopoulos, P Cruce, C Russell, H Leinweber,

A Flores, K Ramer, B Kerr, M Feuerstein, L Philpott,

E Grimes

SP Systems K Bromund

APL H Korth

NASA/GSFC V Kondratovich

MPE E Georgescu

TUBS U Auster

CETP P Robert, O LeContel

Calgary B Jackel, E Donovan

Acknowledgements


SPEDAS concept

• What is SPEDAS?- Space Physics Environment Data Analysis Software- Future development plan for TDAS software, originally developed

for the THEMIS mission- Developer hooks to access core capabilities (data loading,

plotting, analysis, GUI) in a way that eases and supports development of modules for other missions.

- Ultimate goal: establish SPEDAS as the platform of choice for the space physics community, similar to what Solarsoft has done for the solar community

• IDL based (library of routines –but no main program!).• Code is free and available to everyone• Platform independent. Works on:

- Solaris, Linux, Windows, Vista, Mac OS X• Missions currently supported or planned to support

• THEMIS/ARTEMIS, Wind, ACE, ERG, IUGONET, OMNI, GOES FAST, Van Allen probes (EFW, RBSPICE)


SPEDAS concept

• SPEDAS design objectives• Provide a stable, thoroughly tested, easy-to-use, easily-

extensible framework to support other missions• Developers for other missions relieved of the burden of

reinventing the wheel and duplicating effort that has already gone into the existing tools

• More freedom to concentrate on mission-specific analysis tools, rather than the nuts and bolts of developing or testing GUI components, file transfer routines, and other framework-level components.

• Portability • Can be used on any hardware or OS platform supported by

IDL• Simplicity

• Narrow, well-defined interface between framework code and mission-specific code


Development status

• What is the current status of SPEDAS development?• QA testing in progress for SPEDAS 1.0 release, expected

late June/early July 2014. Nearly all the functionality is stable and working well – we are at the stage of tracking down some of the more obscure platform-specific oddities and performance issues.

• Release will include latest plugin modules for THEMIS, ERG, and IUGONET missions.

• We will release packages compatible with the IDL Virtual Machine environment. For this release, we have purchased an additional IDL development license, which will allow us to redistribute SPEDAS plus the IDL VM environment. Previously, VM users had to obtain the VM software directly from Exelis, then obtain the VM SPEDAS release from us. Now we should be able to provide everything needed in a single download. We intend to compile and distribute VM packages for all the major platforms (Linux, Windows, Mac).


New SPEDAS Features since 2013 release

•Support for using CDAWeb web services, to load data sets from nearly every mission supported by SPDF.

•Access to various geomagnetic indices from within the SPEDAS GUI

•Access to Tsyganenko field models from within the GUI

•Numerous updates and enhancements to the THEMIS, ERG, GOES, and IUGONET plugins.

•Plugins now have access to the configuration settings panel, and can add items to the new top level “Plugins” menu.


Still to do:

• Disentangle project-specific code from framework-level code• We have made significant progress on separating the

framework code from the project-specific code, but there are still a few dependencies left – for example, the coordinate transforms available via the Data Analysis menu use THEMIS code and assume THEMIS conventions.

• Define a Quality Assurance process for both the SPEDAS framework and mission-specific plugins.

• Decouple SPEDAS development and release cycle from plugin development and releases

• Add support for plugin-specific help requests or trouble reports.


Still to do:

• Figure out how to handle higher dimensional data (e.g, movies, data cubes, other structures beyond the currently supported line plots & spectrograms)

• Further refinement of plugin API. Each feature (load panels, configuration panels, menu items) currently requires a separate ASCII configuration file to record the relevant plugin-specific details. The goal is to have a single configuration file to register each plugin’s setup code, then provide routines for the plugin to register itself in the load data panel, the configuration panel, etc.


Still to do:

• Provide a common source code repository for SPEDAS and plugin code, so that framework and plugin developers can access the latest unreleased code, with finer grained commit privileges to define which developers can make changes, and where.


Spedas.org is now live!

• SPEDAS and plugin downloads

• Documentation wiki

• Mailing list

• Blog

We welcome plugin developers to contribute content and participate in discussions on the SPEDAS site! We had a bad experience when we initially set up the site with open access (the wiki was taken over by spammers in very short order), so please contact Jim Lewis ([email protected]) to register for read-write access to the site.

Documents

SPEDASSlide − 1GEM June 19, 2014 SPEDAS: A framework for supporting multi- mission data analysis and visualization