Common and uncommon goals and software

["Creager, Robert S" <CreagRS@LOUISVILLE.STORTEK.COM>]

Hello all,

I've a question which will either beat me into submission, or something
else.  When folks are talking about data reductions, the thread seems to
ends up about how everyone is doing something different, and if a data
reduction pipeline is set up, it's possible that only the person who set it
up will use it.

Shouldn't there be an effort to generate a generic data reduction pipeline
which everyone runs on the data taken from their camera?  This pipeline
would be completely automated once set up, such that it could be run from a
cron job (Linux) or from the windows scheduler.  This would only burden a
CPU, and not the person running the camera, leaving that person to do the
data reductions specific to their goals.  Presumably this data would end up
in some kind of database (ASCII flat file, PostgreSQL, Oracle...).  If
anyone had access to a machine with the storage/bandwidth necessary to be a
central database server, syncing could also be automated.  Otherwise,
sending out CD's with database information every now and then would
accomplish the same with minimal user intervention.

"The non-astronomer" Rob

PS - I ran SPS2 on my Sparc Ultra 5 (with parameter data from the SPS
validation information), and it crunched all the data on disk 16 in 8494
seconds (80 images at 106 seconds per image).  The log file indicates about
60 seconds between pictures (is this data download?), so the crunching is
near real time (for SPS at least) on a reasonably fast computer.