Overview of the DiFX GUI

The DiFX GUI was developed at the United State Naval Observatory as a front end to the DiFX software correlator. It was designed to minimize the effort required to conduct "normal" correlation tasks without crippling the flexibility sophisticated operators require for unique or unusual operations. While it was designed to make running the correlator easier, running the GUI (and reading this documentation) requires some understanding of DiFX and its components.

What the GUI Does

The USNO GUI serves two purposes:

DiFX Cluster Monitor

The GUI monitors and displays the health and activity of DiFX cluster components (processors, Mark5 units, etc) and shows the progress of DiFX jobs running on the cluster. In this capacity it is essentially a passive observer, serving as a somewhat more colorful replacement to the errormon, mk5mon and cpumon scripts that come with DiFX.

Experiment/Job Administrator

The GUI can also be used to create runnable jobs from "raw" data - scans and .vex file content. Files required to run DiFX and directories for data products are all created according to user specifications, and jobs are organized in "Experiments" and "Passes", all of which can be stored using a database. The GUI can then instruct DiFX to process these jobs, and will then monitor their progress and data products in detail.

The GUI can also be used to perform some of the maintenance tasks associated with software correlators.