[fitsbits] FITS evolution {External}

[Dirk Petry]

Hi,
I am member of the ALMA team looking into the design the the "next generation"
ALMA data processing and on behalf of that group (which contains many of your NRAO colleagues),
I have been trying to learn more about the plans for the evolution of FITS.
After first contacting Mark Calabretta and learning that he is retired since 10 years
and then contacting the FITS working group at NASA and learning from Bill Pence
that also the FITS working group has been mostly inactive since almost 10 years,
I am now contacting you.

ALMA will produce huge image cubes in the future with 10000 channels or more, possibly
Terabytes in size. So people are wondering about the image storage format, and if FITS will
be the right choice in the future.

FITS is a very mature format which is well supported inside and even outside
the astronomy world. Tests by the ALMA Archive subsystem scientist with FITS image cubes
of up to 42 TB in size together with the CARTA visualization package,
have shown that such a cube can still be loaded and viewed with reasonable response times.
So in principle, FITS still seems to be up to the task.

And having an archival format which is different from the format served to users
requires translation which is expensive. Storing and serving in FITS might be the best
also in the future.

Do you know if there are plans to update/extend the FITS format to support some sort of
hierarchical storage format like HDF5 under the hood?
Could you point me to web pages where such developments are discussed?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Best regards and season's greetings!

Dirk

-- 
Dr. Dirk Petry, ALMA Regional Centre,
ESO, Karl-Schwarzschild-Strasse 2, 85748 Garching,
Germany, Phone: +49 89 3200-6511, Fax: -6358