ESO Reflex: Using a Workflow Engine for Data Reduction

Sampo (Hook et al. 2005) is a three year project that began in 2005 January. It is led by ESO and conducted by a software development team from Finland as an in-kind contribution to joining ESO. The goal of the project is to assess the needs of the ESO community in the area of data reduction and analysis environments, and to create pilot software products that illustrate critical steps along the road to a new system. Those prototypes will not only be used to validate concepts and understand requirements, but will also be tools of immediate value for the community. The Sampo team has been researching new ways in which instrument pipeline recipes can be executed in a more flexible way. The requirements gathering process resulted in a prototype application called ESO Reflex that offers a novel approach to astronomical data reduction. The integration of a modern graphical user interface and robust legacy data reduction algorithms gives the astronomer user the best of both worlds: ease of use combined with the re-use of well-tested algorithms. 1. The Workflow Approach Much of the raw data produced by ESO instruments is reduced using CPL recipes. The CPL recipes are C programs that follow an ESO standard and utilize routines provided by the Common Pipeline Library (CPL). Each of these recipes performs a single task in the reduction process. Up to now the recipes were run within the ESO pipeline infrastructure, or off-line, one at a time using http://www.eso.org/sampo http://www.eso.org/sampo/reflex/ http://www.eso.org/cpl