Quick Intro

• I'm Dan
   
• I design platforms for space science
• I send things to ~space (stratosphere)

Parameter Space

• Spin-out company from UCD School of Physics
   
• Started with contract to build a platform for Gaia
  • Gaia: ESA satellite observing our galaxy
  • Platform: Allow scientists to analyse data without downloading it
     
• Working on similar systems now

Gaia

• Scans 1 billion stars in our galaxy using 2 telescopes
  • Determine their position/motion very accurately
• Observations on either side of the sun helps determine distance

http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Gaia

Platform objectives

1. Enable user-contributed code to run close to the Gaia archive
   Not so bad..
    
2. Support the reuse of these codes by others
   A different beast
    
3. Support the sharing of results

Some interesting parts

• Pipelines defined by code
  • Luigi (SciLuigi)
     
• Code isolation + integration
  • Docker containers (Docker-py)
  • Built-in Django framework
     
• Command line client (auto generated)
  • Django Rest Framework
    • + Django Rest Swagger
  • Click

Some interesting parts

[Luigi] Define pipelines in Python

https://luigi.readthedocs.io/en/stable/tasks.html

Some interesting parts

[Django/Docker/Docker-py] Isolate and integrate AVIs

Some interesting parts

[DRF+DRS/Click] Generate a CLI using the generated API docs

• Django Rest Framework
  • Simplified making a REST API to the platform
• Django Rest Swagger
  • Automatically generated Swagger docs
     
• Click is a neat library for making CLI tools in Python