ASKAP Science Data Processor software - ASKAPsoft Version 0.20.1

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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A patch release that fixes a few bugs in the pipeline:

* Adds better robustness to the USE_CLI=false option, for use when
the databases at MRO are unavailable.
* A scripting error in the self-calibration script (for the Cmodel
option).
* Fixes to the defineArtifacts script, to better handle FITS
extensions.
* When the image-based continuum-subtraction option is run, the
spectral source-finding job will now search the continuum-subtracted
cube. The spectral source-finding will also handle sub-bands
correctly.
* There have also been fixes to ensure the continuum-subtracted
cubes are created in appropriate FITS format and mosaicked
correctly.
* Copying of continuum validation files to the archive directory has
been updated to reflect an improved directory structure.

It also makes a few minor changes to the processing software:

* The Wiener preconditioner will now report in the log the amount by
which the point-source sensitivity is expected to increase over the
theoretical naturally-weighted level.
* The casdaupload utility can now produce an XML file with absolute
paths to data products, leaving them in place - rather than copying
all data products to the upload directory. This is compatible with
behaviour introduced in CASDA-1.10.
* Ccalapply has a new parameter than can restrict the sizes of chunks
presented in single iterations, using new options for the
TableDataSource classes.
* The component catalogue produced by Selavy had a minor error in the
calculation of the error on the integrated flux (where the minor
axis should have been used, the major axis was used instead).
* Fixed issues with cmodel functional tests, relating to using the
correct catalogue columns.
* Fixed a failing scimath unit test.
* The ingest pipeline now can apply phase gradients in parallel.