Sourcefinder The future of Sourcefinder

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Newshound
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#1 Sourcefinder The future of Sourcefinder

Post by Newshound »


As some of you will remember from my previous post, Sourcefinder is going to see some significant changes coming in the next few months. I thought it was time I properly outlined exactly what's happening.


The introduction of SoFiA

I'm currently working on integrating the SoFiA sourcefinding application in to Sourcefinder. In order to integrate SoFiA cleanly, I'm working on a fairly significant overhaul to a lot of the Sourcefinder backend systems that will allow support for multiple sourcefinding applications. My aim here is to make it as easy as possible to add new sourcefinding applications to the system in the future. If anyone is interested, you can see the changes I'm making in the module_rework branch of our git repository.

I'll most probably be sending out quite a few test work units while working on integrating SoFiA, so you'll probably get odd spats of work until it's integrated properly.

Once SoFiA is working correctly, we'll be processing all of the work units in the simulated cube again, but this time using SoFiA instead of duchamp.



SoFiA vs Duchamp research paper

The scientists who will be using the data from this project plan on writing a research paper comparing the performance of Duchamp and SoFiA as sourcefinders. From what I've been told, the data analysis side of this project is most likely to be performed by an ICRAR studentship student either at the end of this year or the end of next year.

I plan on ensuring that as many people as possible who contributed to Sourcefinder will have their names/usernames listed in the research paper before it's published.

You'll hear more about this paper in a few months once SoFiA is integrated properly in to Sourcefinder.



Real data from ASKAP

As I stated in the previous post, we should have some real data from ASKAP to process on Sourcefinder in the coming months. The moment this data becomes available to me, I'll be sending out work units for Duchamp, and later for SoFiA. I don't have a timeframe on when this data will be available aside from "soon", but I'm hoping we'll see it within a few months.



Visualisation of Sourcefinder results

I plan on developing a little web applet that will probably live on http://www.theskynet.org to allow anyone to view the sources found by Duchamp and SoFiA. My current plan for this applet is to display an image of the cube slice that the source was found in, a small highlight indicating the source, and a list of the users who contributed to finding the source.

I'll be starting work on this applet after SoFiA is integrated in to Sourcefinder.



Workunits

The workunits that were lost in the back end storage issue that I spoke about in the last post has all been reprocessed (thank you!). This means there wont be a significant number of workunits for Sourcefinder for a little while.
I'll try to make this period as short as possible (hopefully a month or two at most), but it really depends on how easy it is to integrate SoFiA.


Project URL change

At some point I plan on changing the project URL from https://sourcefinder.theskynet.org/duchamp to https://sourcefinder.theskynet.org/sourcefinder. The original name 'duchamp' was a carry over from before I event inherited this project. I didn't think we'd be running multiple applications, so I just left it. Obviously once SoFiA is working, the 'duchamp' part of the URL wont make much sense, so I'll be changing it to the more generic 'sourcefinder'. I'll give everyone a weeks notice before I change anything, so you should have time to change over easily. I'll also ensure the old URL still works, but simply re-directs to the new one.



Gridcoin whitelist


There's currently a poll up for adding Sourcefinder to the gridcoin whitelist. If you're interested in voting yes or no, please check out the post Erkan made about it.



I think that's about everything I have for now. I'll try to keep everyone as updated as possible on all of these issues.

Thank you again for helping out with Sourcefinder!


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