ASKAP Science Data Processor software - ASKAPsoft Version 0.20.3

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 fixing a couple of calibrator issues:

* The 0.20 updates to the calibrator to allow interaction with the
calibration data service had prevented ccalibrator from writing
more than one row to the output calibration table. This fix ensures
the table that gets written has all the information when solving
for time-dependent gains.
* The bandpass calibrator would very occasionally fail with an error
along the lines of "ERROR: SVD decomposition failed to
converge". This will now only trigger a WARN in the log file, but
will not abort the program. Work is still being done to properly
flag channels that suffer this.

And a couple of pipeline issues have been fixed:

* The beams that are processed by the pipeline are now limited by the
number of beams in the bandpass calibrator scheduling block (in the
same way that the science SB is used to limit the number of beams).
* Minor issues with copying the continuum validation results have
been resolved.

Additionally, casacore (in 3rdParty) is now built with the python
bindings, so that libcasa_python will be available.