Fink Science Portal

The Fink Science Portal allows users to browse and display alert data collected and processed by Fink from a web browser: https://fink-portal.org.

The backend is using Apache HBase, a distributed non-relational database. The frontend is based on Dash, a Python web framework built on top of Flask, Plotly and React. The frontend has also integrated components to perform fit on the data, such as gatspy for variable stars, pyLIMA for microlensing, or the imcce tools for Solar System objects.

Backend structure

After each observation night, the data is aggregated and pushed into Apache HBase tables. The main table contains all alert data processed by Fink since 2019-11-01. This represents more than 217 million alerts collected, and about 147 million scientifically valid (8.0 TB) as of 01/2024. The main table data is indexed along the objectId of alerts, and the emission date jd.

In order to allow multi-indexing with HBase, we create index tables. These tables are indexed along different properties (time, sky position, classification, ...). They contain the same number of rows than the main table but fewer columns. These index tables are used to perform fast search along arbitrary properties and isolate interesting candidates, while the main table is used to display final data.

We developed custom HBase clients to manipulate the data efficiently (Lomikel, FinkBrowser, more information here).

Tests

You can test the REST API using:

./run_tests.sh --url https://fink-portal.org

The folder tests contain many example on how to use the REST API.

Deployment

The portal has been tested on Python 3.11. Other versions might work.

Local deployment

If you want to deploy on your machine for test purposes, you can follow the tutorial. Note that a Dockerfile should be ready at some point.

Production

The frontend is host at the VirtualData cloud at Université Paris-Saclay, France. To deploy it, just edit config.yml.

APIURL: https://fink-portal.org
IP: fink-portal.org
PORT: 24000
HBASEIP: hbase-1.lal.in2p3.fr
ZOOPORT: 2183
SCHEMAVER: "schema_3.1_5.0.0"
tablename: ztf

and the launch is supervised by gunicorn:

gunicorn index:server -b :24000 --workers=4

In practice we also use a reverse-proxy (nginx).