ASKAP Science Data Processor software - ASKAPsoft Version 0.21.1

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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A patch release fixing minor issues with the 0.21.0 version of the processing pipeline scripts. Only the scripts and the documentation are changed.

Fixes to the pipeline:

* The bandpass validation script will now find the correct files when an OUTPUT directory is used.
* Similarly, the statsPlotter script is now more robust against the use of the OUTPUT option.
* Parallel processing enabled for the larger ccalapply jobs.
* The Channels selection parameter for continuum imaging can be left out when NUM_CPUS_CONTIMG_SCI is provided, with a new parameter CHANNEL_SELECTION_CONTIMG_SCI available to specify a selection.
* The snapshot imaging option is turned back on by default for all imaging with the pipeline, following further testing & feedback from commissioning & operations teams.
* There is better specification of the imagetype parameter in the Selavy parsets - there were issues when imagetype=casa was used.