ASKAP Science Data Processor software - ASKAPsoft Version 0.17.0

Full description

ASKAPsoft, the ASKAP Science Data Processor, provides data processing functionality, including:

* Calibration
* Spectral line imaging
* Continuum imaging
* Source detection and generation of source catalogs
* Transient detection

ASKAPsoft is developed as a part of the CSIRO Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) Science Data Processor component. ASKAPsoft is a key component in the ASKAP system. It is the primary software for storing and processing raw data, and initiating the archiving of resulting science data products into the data archive (CASDA).

The processing pipelines within ASKAPsoft are largely written in C++ built on top of casacore and other third party libraries. The software is designed to be parallelised, where possible, for performance.

ASKAPsoft is designed to be built and executed in a standard Unix/Linux environment and core dependencies must be fulfilled by the platform. These include, but are not limited to, a C/C++/Fortran compiler, Make, Python 2.7, Java 7 and MPI. More specific dependencies are downloaded by the ASKAPsoft build system and are installed within the ASKAPsoft development tree. Specific to the Debian platform, after a standard installation of Debian Wheezy (7.x) the following packages will need to be installed with apt-get:

* g++
* gfortran
* openjdk-7-jdk
* python-dev
* flex
* bison
* openmpi-bin
* libopenmpi-dev
* libfreetype6-dev
* libpng12-dev

More information regarding the building, installation and running of the software can be found in the README file in the root of the file structure that forms this collection.

Source code can be accessed via the links in Related Materials section.

-----

New features:

* Capability for direct FITS output from imager. The "fits" imagetype
is now supported for cimager and imager. This should be considered "beta"
as the completeness of the header information for post processing has not
been confirmed. This enables the parallel write of FITS cubes which considerably
improves the performance of spectral line imaging.
* Selavy's RM Synthesis module can export the Faraday Dispersion
Function to an image on disk.
* New source-finding capabilities in the processing pipelines, with a
spectral-line source-finding task added (using Selavy), and the
option of RM Synthesis done in the continuum source-finding.
* The full-resolution measurement set can be purged by the pipeline
when no longer needed (ie. after the averaging has been done, and
if no spectral-line imaging is required). This will help to
minimise unncessary disk-space usage.
* CASDA upload is now able to handle extracted spectral data products
(object spectra and moment maps etc) that are produced by the
source-finding tasks.
* A few relatively minor additions have been made to the pipeline
scripts:
- A minimum UV distance can be applied to the bandpass calibration.
- The checks done on the self-calibration parameters are less
restrictive and less prone to give warning messages.
- Mosaicking at the top level (combining FIELDs) is now not done
when there is only a single FIELD.
* User documentation has been updated to better reflect the current
arrangements with Pawsey (e.g. host names and web addresses). It
also describes new modules that are available, as well as
alternative visualisation options using Pawsey's zeus cluster.

Plus various bug fixes.