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 It was closed down when its funding was withdrawn by the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council in 2005.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 task was passed again in mid-2015 to the East Asian Observatory. The latest version was released on 2018 July 19. Part of the software is relicensed under the GNU GPL while some of it remain under the original custom licence.

History

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. Between 1992 and 1995 the project switched to UNIX (and switched the networking to TCP/IP), supporting Digital UNIX on Alpha-based systems, and Solaris on systems from Sun Microsystems. By the late 1990s it was additionally supporting Linux, and by 2005 it was supporting Red Hat Linux, Solaris, and Tru64 UNIX. It was about this time that the project open-sourced its software (using the GNU General Public License; it had previously had an "academic use only" licence), and reworked its build system so that the software could be built on a much broader range of POSIX-like systems, including OS X and Cygwin. Though it was not explicitly funded to do so, the project was an early participant in the Virtual Observatory movement, and contributed to the IVOA. One of its VO applications was TOPCAT, development of which continues, with AstroGrid funding.

Applications, libraries, and other facilities

The project produced a number of applications and libraries, including: The project also produced a number of cookbooks on various astronomical topics. By the end, the project's code base consisted of around 100 components, totalling around 2,100,000 source lines of code written by the project or curated by it, in various languages including Fortran, C, C++, Java, Perl and Tcl/Tk, plus another 700,000 lines of customised third-party code.

Obtaining the software

At present, though funding for the project has ceased, the software is still available, either as pre-built distributions, or from a Git repository. The Astrophysics Source Code Library maintains an entry on Starlink. The Joint Astronomy Centre took over the maintenance of the Starlink codebase (with support from STFC), and made the following releases: The East Asian Observatory has now taken over co-ordination and maintenance of Starlink software, and it has made the following releases: