STOA - Script Tracking for Observational Astronomy

At Cambridge we have developed an advanced workflow management system to enable us to scale up our analyses of inteferometric maps to large archived data sets.

Workflows and Worktables

To maintain commonality with other workflow systems, we use Common Workflow Language (CWL) to specify our tools. We incorporate workflows into worktables, where the inputs and outputs of the workflow specify the columns, and each row represents one instance of the workflow being run.

These worktables are linked in a relational style to provide a higher level organisational structure, and hold provenance tracking information. Upstream changes to worktable contents automatically flag dependent downstream tables as being outdated, and permit STOA to perform the minimal recomputation required in order to correctly update the project.

Interface

We have developed a multi-user web interface that is currently being tested internally. Users can upload workflow files and code, run it remotely, and set up services which allow the results to be made available to all either through download links or through programmatic query methods such as VO cone search.

Support

STOA is freely available at https://github.com/petehague/Stoa under an Apache license, but is currently experimental.
In case of any difficulties potential users should contact Peter Hague using the form below.