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Session 74 - Ground-Based Instruments.
Display session, Wednesday, January 17
North Banquet Hall, Convention Center

[74.04] The Macho Data Pipeline

T. S. Axelrod (MSSSO, Australia and LLNL), R. A. Allsman (Supercomputing Facility, Australian National U., Australia), P. J. Quinn (ESO, Germany), D. P. Bennett (Center for Particle Astrophysics, UC Berkeley), K. C. Freeman, B. A. Peterson, A. W. Rodgers (MSSSO, Australia), C. Alcock, K. H. Cook (LLNL), D. R. Alves (UC Davis and LLNL), K. Griest (UC San Diego), S. L. Marshall, M. R. Pratt (UC Santa Barbara), C. W. Stubbs (U. Washington), W. Sutherland (Oxford U., U.K.)

The MACHO experiment is monitoring more than 20 million stars in the LMC and Galactic bulge for gravitational microlensing events and other forms of variability. The hardware consists of a 50 inch telescope, a two-color 32 megapixel ccd camera, and a network of computers. On clear nights the system generates up to 8 GB of raw data and 1 GB of reduced data. The computer system is responsible for all realtime control tasks, for data reduction, and for storing all data associated with each observation in a data base. The subject of this poster is the software system that handles these functions. It is an integrated system controlled by Petri nets that consists of multiple processes communicating via mailboxes and a bulletin board. The system is highly automated, readily extensible, and incorporates flexible error recovery capabilities. It is implemented with C++ in a Unix environment.

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