ASKAP Science Data Processor software - ASKAPsoft Version 0.19.0

Brief 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.

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New Features:

* linmos now produces mosaicks with correct masking of pixels in
in both CASA and FITS formats.
* linmos can also remove the contribution of the primary beam frequency
dependence to the Taylor term images. This only applies to Gaussian
primary beam models.
* Added Selavy support for FITS outputs
* Addition of ACES-OPS module to facilitate controlled dependency between ASKAPsoft and ACES Tools.
* Parallelised the RM Synthesis module in Selavy.
* New Selavy output - a map of the residual emission not covered by the fitted Gaussians in a continuum image.
* Developed patch for casacore's poor handling of the lanczos interpolation method.
* Added support for casdaupload to handle spectral-line catalogues.
* CASDA related Support for new image types.
* Ensure calibration tables are uploaded to CASDA.
* Added support for continuum validation script and results including CASDA upload.
* Improvements to Selavy spectral-line parameterisation.
* Selavy sets spectral index & curvature to a flag-value if not calculated rather than leaving as zero.

Bug Fixes
* linmos, reduced memory footprint. A bug was found that was causing a complete image cube to accessed, when only the image shape was required. This has been fixed.
* Selavy catalogues occasionally fail CASDA validation due to wide columns - fixed.
* Fixed bug where restore.beam.cutoff value not read from parset when present.
* Added missing beam log output to new imager.
* Improved handling of failed processing and the effect of that on executing final diagnostics/FITSconversion/thumbnails jobs at end of pipeline.
* Use number of beams in footprint rather than assume 36.
* Minor bug fixes