SolarSoft
S.L.Freeland, freeland@penumbra.nascom.nasa.gov, Last Revision: 19-September-1997
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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 can and do integrate executables
written in other languages. The SSW environment should provide a consistant
look and feel at various CO-I institutions (SOHO, Yohkoh, etc) which will
facilitate sharing and exchange and minimize "coming-up-to-speed" time when
doing research away from your home institute.
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, and eventually will
incorporate TRACE 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)
- 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 indepedent 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. For example, the
SOHO suggested
FITS keywords and standard Yohkoh and SOHO time formats
(IDL structures).
- 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 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)
(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 are a subset of this tree - thus, an EIT/SXT-only installation is ok
and would look like...
SSW
|
--------------------------------
| | | |
SITE GEN SOHO YOHKOH
| |
---- ----
| | | |
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
