ASKAP Science Data Processor software - ASKAPsoft Version 0.20.0

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.

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Pipelines:
* Corrected the use of the $ACES environment variable when running the
continuum validation script, so that pecularities of the local
environment are appropriately dealt with.
* Some corrections in pipeline scripts regarding FITS mode processing:
- Ensures the continuum linmos image is copied at the field-level
mosaicking job.
- Ensures the spectral-line selavy job uses the correct file
extensions.
- Ensures the imcontsub job converts the contsub cube to fits at the
end if we are working in FITS mode.
- Updates the naming of the contsub cube to ensure consistency
(removing .fits from the middle of it).
* Improve copying of spectral weights images when running linmos to avoid
ambiguities and prevent unnecessary files.
* Added a parameter, DO_SOURCE_FINDING_FIELD_MOSAICS, to turn off source
finding for individual fields and rely on the source finding for the
final mosaic instead. This prevents unnecessary source finding jobs
being launched.
* Selavy source finding jobs now have scheduling block ID (SBID) passed
in parsets.
* The casdaupload utility can now handle cubelets (as well as spectra
& moment-maps). These are included by the casda script in the
pipeline.
* TIME selection options in flagging are now exposed in pipeline
scripts via TIME_FLAG_SCIENCE, TIME_FLAG_SCIENCE_AV and
TIME_FLAG_1934. It is up to the user to provide suitable values.
* Pipelines allow processing of scheduling blocks (SB) where the number
of measurement sets (MS) is different to the number of beams. This
addresses an issue where the SB have recorded 36 MSs but only a
subset of them are valid.
* The use of dcp for copying MSs from the archive is turned off by
default to minimise the load on the hpc-data nodes (the method for
doing this is not ideal).

Processing Software:
* Modifications to Selavy to include additional information in the
headers of the spectra & related images (Object name, date-obs
and duration, Project ID and SBID, history comments).
* Fixed a problem where mslist output was corrupted by long field
names.
* Shortened objectID strings are now used in catalogues. No longer
uses image name, but instead SBID + catalogue/data product type +
sequence ID.