May 22, 2019
Grinder - IRAF
As of this writing, the control room software is based on IRAF.
IRAF is a now largely obsolete collection of software that was extremely
popular in the 80's and 90's in the astronomical community.
Today it is largely abandoned. The staff at NOAO that once supported it
have either retired or lost interest, and much of the astronomical
community is now busy writing code in Python.
Even Pyraf, which was a set of python bindings to the IRAF tools has
fallen by the wayside.
Be all that as it may, the oven software we use is based on IRAF.
In fact it is an IRAF extension or package and can only run inside
of IRAF. The software is written in a mix of SPP (a unique FORTRAN
dialect) and C. Details on this can be found elsewhere.
IRAF versions
Our old suns run the following version:
NOAO Sun/IRAF Revision 2.11.3 Thu Feb 10 22:45:18 MST 2000
This is the EXPORT version of Sun/IRAF V2.11 for SunOS 4 and Solaris 2.7
And for the record, the old suns run the following (Solaris 8).
version
Machine hardware: sun4u
OS version: 5.8
Processor type: sparc
Hardware: SUNW,Ultra-5_10
Our modern linux machines run the following version of IRAF:
NOAO/IRAF PC-IRAF Revision 2.16.1 EXPORT Mon Oct 14 21:40:13 MST 2013
This is the EXPORT version of IRAF V2.16 supporting PC systems.
Running the oven software
Two IRAF packages are significant. These are "mirror" and "scopes".
Mirror is the official oven control room software.
Scopes is John Hill's catch-all package, the item of interest in it is
the "furnace" sub-package. This is a big collection of scripts to graph
data, as well as a lot of unique and important documentation in the form
of help files. More on both of these elsewhere.
Have any comments? Questions?
Drop me a line!
Tom's home page / [email protected]