NCSA   Quick Search Contact Archivist
CARMA Data Archive
About the Archive Archive Access Related Links

Obtaining a Password

 To access the Archive, you will need to authenticate yourself as an approved user by providing a username and password. That is, the first time you access a restricted portion of the archive, your browser will pop up a window into which you must enter a valid username and password. Users from a CARMA consortium site, normally obtain these from the local CARMA Director. Outside users should contact the archivist at carma@ncsa.uiuc.edu.

System Requirements

Common browsers (Firefox, Netscape) on Linux and Macintosh systems with Java 1.5 installed can be used to download data from the archive. If your browser does not recognize the .jnlp suffix and asks for an application to use to open it, select javaws from your local Java installation bin directory.

Using the Archive

As of this writing, typical interactions with the archive include three activities:

Searching for Data

 You search for data in the archive through one of the Archive's search forms. The Archive provides two types: When you submit a search, the results are displayed in a hierarchical format reflecting the organization of the archive. You can control how much information is included before submitting the search through display options in the search form.

Browsing Data

Datasets in the archive are organized into hierarchical collections, and every collection has a Project ID associated with it. Collections are listed as observing block IDs and corresponding data files.

Retrieving Data

 On the search result page, data files can be downloaded one at a time by clicking on the filename itself, or downloaded with DaRT by selecting multiple files then launching DaRT through Java Web Start.

Providing Comments and Reporting Bugs

If you experience problems using the archive or have any comments, questions, or suggestions about the archive, you can contact the archivist by sending mail to carma@ncsa.uiuc.edu. Response time during weekdays is usually less than a day; a longer delay should be expected on weekends, although the mail usually checked daily.

Many problems users experience can be traced to network difficulties happening anywhere between CARMA and NCSA or within NCSA itself. High network traffic is one such source. Occasionally, you may be unable to contact the archive server (with an error message like "Connection refused"). Such a problem often corrects itself after the traffic dies down. In this case, you should try your request later.

Note that if you are unable to access the archive as described above, sending us email is still helpful. It will alert the archivist to the problem, allowing him or her to ensure that the problem gets fixed as soon as possible. Note that problems in the network may also delay our receiving your message, thus delaying our response.

NCSA Quick Search Contact Archivist
The CARMA Data Archive is a project of Radio Astronomy Imaging Team
at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Contact the Archivist: carma@ncsa.uiuc.edu