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Free keywords:
Astrophysics, Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics, astro-ph.IM,General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology, gr-qc
Abstract:
Gravitational-wave observatories around the world, including the Laser
Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), record a large volume of
gravitational-wave output data and auxiliary data about the instruments and
their environments. These data are stored at the observatory sites and
distributed to computing clusters for data analysis. LigoDV-web is a web-based
data viewer that provides access to data recorded at the LIGO Hanford, LIGO
Livingston and GEO600 observatories, and the 40m prototype interferometer at
Caltech. The challenge addressed by this project is to provide meaningful
visualizations of small data sets to anyone in the collaboration in a fast,
secure and reliable manner with minimal software, hardware and training
required of the end users. LigoDV-web is implemented as a Java Enterprise
Application, with Shibboleth Single Sign On for authentication and
authorization and a proprietary network protocol used for data access on the
back end. Collaboration members with proper credentials can request data be
displayed in any of several general formats from any Internet appliance that
supports a modern browser with Javascript and minimal HTML5 support, including
personal computers, smartphones, and tablets. To date 634 unique users have
visited the LigoDV-web website in a total of 33,861 sessions and generated a
total of 139,875 plots. This infrastructure has been helpful in many analyses
within the collaboration including follow-up of the data surrounding the first
gravitational-wave events observed by LIGO in 2015.
