As detailed in previous meetings, NSF requires us to include specific development projects (and their costs) with the NAASC proposal to be submitted in March. These need to be items that were identified by the community as being the most scientifically promising. Inclusion in our proposal has no bearing on whether these will be the development projects supported by the international project (although we do expect proposals for these to be submitted for Board consideration when the call for development projects eventually goes out). Todd & Al both worked a lot this month on see which of the ANASAC/ASAC identified development project would fit within the guidance development funding profile for 2012-2015, and will present a summary here. Here is a strawman version that fits the funding profile.
User Test 6 (UT6) is on schedule to start in mid Jan2010. UT6 is the primary focus for pipeline testing right now. Pretesting (done by the developer) is expected to finish up this month (this is a critical step in test preparation). The test scope includes calibration, imaging improvements, small mosaics, and will involve outside users. There may be 6-8 testers (very preliminary number). There has also been significant changes to the user documentation, which will certainly result in user feedback to improve it.
NAASC testers: Official - Rachel, Crystal. Unofficial - John, Brenda, Kartik. JH: ask Ed Fomalont
Next release (3.0) will be December. This is a VERY IMPORTANT release, as it will be the version used for EVLA early science. Will need LOTS of real-world testing. Developer freeze in Oct, test in Nov.
important test targets: cvel, clean, importasdm, asdm2ms, exportuvfits
ObsPrep (incl. ObsTool=OT) (Harvey)
OT "Auto-Deployed" version. Can be used now to get experience with OT, but its a very unstable version and not always available
Beta release April 2010.
Technical Assessment WG (Harvey, Todd, Jeff, Crystal):
Harvey sent out email on this; recipients should provide feedback to him
Casapy simulator (Remy)
Remy gave walkthrough demonstration on Nov 19 to an international viewership, followed by discussion of future priorities. Summary include under "Additional Items" below
REMY SHOULD POST HIS PPT PRESENTATION. Incorporate receipies into
Jan 11/12 CV: implementation workshop - more detailed tutorials on working with simdata and Simulator, work on web interface (EU), discussion of atmospheric corruption with Bojan, etc.
Once Tony gets back from Chile, will start process of defining subset of spectral lines that should be included in CASA & Obstool for offline use (email from CIPT).
EPO (J. Stoke)
Mark A., John S, Jeff Hellermann, A.Russell going to OSF next week to shoot video for ALMA
NAASC items submitted to JAO for November Monthly report
Hiring activities
Software Application Developer K. Sharp joined NAASC to work on ALMA helpdesk and User Portal solutions
Search Committee for next three NAASC scientific hires met
Posted advertisement for NA Commissioning postdoc
Issued job requisition for System Administrator to manager NAASC Archive and Compute systems
Hosted/Invited colloquium speakers interested in NAASC staff positions. (Remijan)
JAO support
Continued CSV liaison duties in Chile including turnos to the OSF: A. Remijan finished 3 mo tour; J. di Francesco provided 1 mo tour; K. Sheth started 4 mo tour.
provided observing support and preparations of the data for the "first fringes" at the high site press release. (Remijan)
submitted DV02 Correlator Report to AIV team before the move to the high site. (Remijan)
investigated issues related to the 1st quadrant correlator and reported to AIV and CORR-IPT. (Remijan)
Provided input for response to the Science Operations Review panel report
Worked on revision of ALMA Operations Plan, Ch. 11
Provided input for ALMA Board meeting
ALMA Science IPT telecon was held
Software Development & testing
Completed new CASA imfit code & regression tests for fitting two dimensional gaussians
Developed new CARMA filler and tested end-2-end CARMA reduction/imaging pathway through CASA
Worked on VLA continuum survey and plotms CASA guides
Extensive pre-release testing of CASA software
CASA User support: 10 new tickets received
Participated in CASA semi-annual face-2-face planning meeting in Socorro
CASA simulator development - corruption of data by atmospheric delay screen, thermal noise, complex gains with various statistics, cross-polarization, etc.
Held walkthrough demonstration of CASA ALMA simulator task simdata and ALMA simulator planning discussion, including participants from Europe and Japan
Participated in testing of NRAO instance of Kayako helpdesk (under evaluation for ALMA), and setup area for CASA support
Conferences and workshops
Developed material for use at January AAS Meeting, including quick reference guide for ALMA, video, ALMA fact-sheet magnet
Other
Drafted preliminary version of NAASC 2012-2015 proposal to NSF
Evaluated cost and phasing of highly rated ALMA development projects for inclusion in NAASC proposal
Conducted ANASAC telecon at which the ANASAC report was discussed, along with development, the NAASC proposal and 2010 workshop possibilities
Continued definition of computing needs and budget for Charlottesville Science Data Center (which will host the NA ALMA mirror archive)
Issued PO for system racks and power distribution needed for Phase I of NA ARC archive systems
Placed upgrade order for NA ARC network link from 100Mbps to 1Gigabit/s (install due in December)
Evaluated possibilities for and potential costs of sharing a proposed 10Gigabit research network link from Chile-US
Completed redesign of NAASC website and filled in content, for debut at January 2010 AAS meeting
Participated in US Astro2010 Decadal panels
Published ALMA article in NRAO eNews
Led discussion on water masers at frequencies other than 1.3cm.
Prepared and delivered lecture on nitrogen isotopes in the solar system and in the interstellar medium
Gave ESO colloquium on the lab and astronomical detection of trans-methyl formate in Chile. (Remijan)
R. Indebetouw Summary of Nov 19, 2009 videocon on ALMA CASA Simulators
Thanks for everyone who participated in the our discussion last week.
Here is my summary of what occurred - please comment or clarify if you
wish.
simdata/Simulator development summary (Indebetouw):
we are building quite a bit of flexibility into the Simulator tool, to corrupt data in various ways.
first implemented are the full corruption - i.e. not yet calibrated data. "residual" corruption i.e. after calibration is future work.
only thermal noise and phase screen will be promoted to the task in the immediate future
simdata suggestions:
task interface could just have a "turn on atmosphere" switch that invoked thermal noise, time-variable Tsys and phase delay
task could leave "gaps" in the time sequence, so one could run simdata twice and concat to fill the gaps with more complex sequences
optionally the gap could contain an unresolved calibrator (single clean component) at some distance and flux from the science mosaic
sdsim development summary (Sugimoto):
built on simdata as prototype, with some details changed, but well-suited to be combined with simdata in the future
adds thermal noise using an older section of the code
sdsim issues identified:
Simulator's new system of corruption by VisCal will require that autocorrelations are turned on in setApply, so that the same VisCals can be applied to single dish data
pointing errors are likely a more important source of corruption for single dish than interferometric data, and should be raised from their previously lower priority
library of simulations (vanKampen)
Needed for:
archive population (relatively low fidelity i.e. if some fields are filled with zeros thats ok for now)
obObs tools e.g. project tracker
examples/tutorials for users
pipeline/heuristic testing (high fidelity - all fields e.g. consistent weather with phase corruption of visibilities)
plan:
identify a group of scientists at the ARCs (vanKampen will start a list of a subset of the DSRP on a wiki for us to all sign up for ~3)
design the project in the OT (APDM out), and also create the simdata inputs (ms out; Petry will work on ms2asdm in ~Jan/Feb)
combine APDM+ASDM
Web interface / enhanced sensitivity calculator (Heywood)
using task_simdata.py as a template, design a simple web interface that runs the simulator task directly.
Action items:
Indebetouw: fix sdsim.setnoise (DONE)
Indebetouw: debug and clean up Simulator improvements