Second Letter

Colleagues,

The National Center for Data Mining (NCDM) at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) is working with Alex Szalay and his colleagues at the National Virtual Observatory (NVO) to help distribute the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) DR4 and DR5 catalog data sets using NCDM's Teraflow Testbed that is based on various U.S. and international high-speed networks. The BestDR4 and BestDR5 SQL Server databases, along with some smaller subsets, are available now for download at NCDM. Information about installing and publishing these datasets is available at http://www.skyserver.org/mirrors/.

The Teraflow Testbed is connected to the following networks: JGN II (Japan), GLORIAD, CSTNet (China), APAN (Pacific Rim), CANet4 (Canada), Abilene (USA), and StarLight (USA). The data is accessible using a high performance distributed storage system we developed, called Sector, from the following locations:

StarLight Networking in Chicago, USA,
NASA in Greenbelt, Maryland, USA,
JGN II in Tokyo, Japan,
KISTI in Daejeon, South Korea, and
Future other locations to be arranged as necessary, including Europe, China, Russia, Canada, and other USA cities.

To obtain the data, please follow the directions on the web site sdss.ncdm.uic.edu. If you are connected to one of these locations with a high speed OC 192 or 10G network, you may be able to download the entire BestDR4 or BestDR5 catalog data set in less than five hours.

More information on Sector, and the download process, can be found at http://sdss.ncdm.uic.edu.

In the very near future, the SDSS DR5 Image (non-catalog, FITS) data will also be available through the Sector web site. A notice will be posted when this is available. If you have any questions, administrative, technical, or otherwise, we can be reached at sdss@ncdm.uic.edu.

We look forward to working with you.

Robert Grossman, Director
National Center for Data Mining
University of Illinois at Chicago