Starlink Project

The Starlink Project, referred to by users as Starlink and by developers as simply The Project, was a UK astronomical computing project which supplied general-purpose data reduction software. Until the late 1990s, it also supplied computing hardware and system administration personnel to UK astronomical institutes. In the former respect, it was analogous to the US IRAF project.

The Project was formally started in 1980, though the funding had been agreed, and some work begun, a year earlier. It was closed down when its funding was withdrawn by the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council in 2005. In 2006, the Joint Astronomy Centre released its own updated version of Starlink and took over maintenance; the latest version was released on 2015 April 6.

Part of the software is relicensed under the GNU GPL while some of it remain under the original custom licence.

From its beginning, the project aimed to cope with the ever-increasing data volumes which astronomers had to handle. A 1982 paper exclaimed that astronomers were returning from observing runs (a week or so of observations at a remote telescope) with more than 10 Gigabits of data on tape; at the end of its life the project was rolling out libraries to handle data of more than 4 Gigabytes per single image.

The project provided centrally-purchased (and thus discounted) hardware, professional system administrators, and the developers to write astronomical data-reduction applications for the UK astronomy community and beyond. At its peak size in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the project had a presence at around 30 sites, located at most of the UK universities with an astronomy department, plus facilities at the Joint Astronomy Centre, the home of UKIRT and the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii. The number of active developers fluctuated between five and more than a dozen.

By 1982, the project had a staff of 17, serving about 400 users at six sites, using seven VAXen (six VAX-11/780s and one VAX-11/750, representing a total of about 6.5 GB of disk space). They were networked from the outset, first with DECNET and later with X.25.

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