PFS software collaboration meeting was held at Princeton University (USA) on 5th and 6th September. About 30 people — not only PFS members for software development, but also several staffs and software engineers from the Subaru Telescope observatory to which PFS will be delivered, and those from National Astronomical Observatory of Japan working on the database system — got together and had intensive discussions of the PFS software.
It is all “software” in short, but it plays various roles: One software is to control individual hardware components and orchestrate them in coordination with the telescope system for quality data acquisition. A data reduction pipeline extracts spectra of astronomical objects from 2D images from detectors and measure spectral features on them. Another software makes a plan of fiber allocation that enables efficient observation of many objects. There is also a software to assess the quality of acquired data and manage the progress of a survey operation. In addition, database and data archive system are key components to the software: The former stores data and information to be shared by the software at observations, and the latter is to store acquired images and spectra.
Different software components with different roles are often associated with different challenges in the development. During the two-day meeting, we shared the development status of individual software components, and then we discussed plans forward with exchanges of ideas to overcome problems and issues each group is running into.
