DUE: preliminary page ready Nov13; new scope: include non-CV sites?
DONE:
NOTES: Carol needs to decide how to incorporate all the different sites & advise Aaron/Shanika (CV/Soc/Tuc/NRC/Chile)
ACTION: Post Simdata walkthrough and 6 recipes
WHO: Remy
DUE: Jan03
DONE:
Action Items from this meeting:
ACTION: Transfer tickets from old CASA helpdesk to kayako instance
WHO: CB: identify tickets to transfer. K.Sharp: transfer tickets
DUE: ?
DONE:
ACTION: Post abstracts for Miami AAS special session and advertise
WHO: D.-C. Kim/AEvans & CL?
DUE: Soon!
DONE:
Agenda
Project News (APeck/RHills)
Due to historic earthquake, offices are closed through next Sunday. Alsacia office seems ok; El Golf had some damage. Travel to Chile is discouraged until next week. All staff we know of appear to be fine (as Eduardo says "Shaken, but not stirred")
ALMA Operations Astronomer positions are posted at AAS Job Register and NRAO Careers site. Please encourage qualified people to apply
We have contracted with Dong-Chan Kim (UVa) to provide half-time support for NAASC Science Web. Dong-Chan will be based in room 220. Will also help with mediawiki content (especially simdata tutorials).
Next CSV tours: AR April 4-24. HL April 18-May 15
Crystal and Todd will be away doing EVLA RSRO April 20-June30
Sheila Kannappan from UNC arrived in January and will be visiting us until June
NAASC weekly meetings formerly held on Tuesdays will henceforth be held on Wednesdays 1:30-2:30 ET.
Shortlist for NAASC Scientists has been made; interviews proceeding
Tony's offer to Robin Pulliam (Az) has been accepted. She will start as a postdoc in June to help support splatalogue while Tony is in Chile
Kartik has a postdoc starting in the Fall to work on S4G: Carlos Munos
ASAC report: EU & EA discussed on Monday. NA will discuss next week. Meeting: Mar 9-10 in Tokyo (CB & BG going)
Main Event:
Harvey: Results of OT testing
Testers: HL, ML, TH, AL, AW.
Harvey reported on various issues. Overall useful.
BG suggests that Alan Bridger could visit OSF while Harvey is there
OT workshop in Garching next week. OSF test output to XML (OT-phase II)
Reports from Cognizant Leads
Pipeline (Remy)
User Test 6 (UT6) is now scheduled to start in Mar? This external test exercises: mosaics, continuum subtracted imaging, group gain calibrations, improved flagging, and improved imaging algorithms
Public release (R3.0) is out. Testing patch 3.1 for EVLA.
ALMA related CASA tutorials took place in Feb in Taiwan; will take place Manchester Mar31-Apr 1 and in Socorro in June (at Summer School)
Using new nrao helpdesk. NEED KELLY TO HELP TRANSFER SOME RELEVANT TICKETS FROM OLD HELPDESK?
ObsPrep (incl. ObsTool=OT) (Harvey & Kartik)
OT "Auto-Deployed" version. Can be used now to get experience with OT, but its a very unstable version and not always available
User test 7.0 released to testers on January 26, with feedback requested by Feb 16. This test will concentrate on Phase I and will use the archive in Santiago. Proposal that are submitted will be important for PT test in March. We have to get many people to take part, and coordinate feedback through Harvey. Planned testers: HL, ML, AW, Adam L., KS? (plus Baker, Johnstone from ASAC)
Beta release April 2010.
Technical Assessment WG (Harvey, Todd, Jeff, Crystal):
I think this effort may have completed? Replace this with Ph1M activities?
Casapy simulator (Remy)
Remy organized and hosted project-wide simulation workshop Jan 11-12 in CV. Meeting clarified and set priorities from user support perspective; discussion on work on web interface (EU), discussion of atmospheric corruption with Bojan, etc. Summary posted at https://safe.nrao.edu/wiki/bin/view/ALMA/Jan2010Wkshop
Eelco van Kampen is trying to amass a simulation library: proposed ALMA projects that will be used primarily to create simulated datasets to put into the archive for testing, but which we also want to use for OT tests, PT tests, and developing tutorials. We need people to contribute to this; Remy should collect what projects NA is working on. Tony R. will organize NRAO postdocs to contribute. Eelco's Website for this effort: http://almasimulations.pbworks.com/
Need to use OT to submit phase I proposals in Feb in order for test scheduled for March.
JM will take part in March test.
External test planned for April, after OT beta release.
EPO (J. Stoke)
Science User Outreach/Webpages (M. Adams/A.Evans)
Dong-Chan Kim will provide part-time support for science web starting very soon
Miami AAS meeting:
May 24-27 in Miami. NAASC attendees: CL, JH, AW, AR, HL, MA, AP.
Monday evening special session on Preparing for ALMA
Abstracts must be submitted by Feb 16
We need to collect abstracts and post. Need to promote
June Summer School June 8-15 in Socorro. NAASC effort being organized by AE. Planned activities:
Thursday (6/10): CB lecture on mm observing
Thursday evening (6/10): elective "Preparing for ALMA" and "Meet the NAASC" session
Friday (6/11): CASA tutorials. NAASC staff will support the EVLA high-frequency tutorial
Tuesday (6/15): elected sessions which will include another CASA tutorial including a CARMA mosaic example and simdata
Rachel & Crystal will prepare ALMA relevant CASA tutorials. Remy will prepare simdata tutorial. NAASC staff must train up on these before so they can support.
NAASC items submitted to JAO for February 2010 Monthly report
Hiring activities
Conducted interviews for NAASC science positions
Collecting applications for NAASC postdocs and administrative support
First NAASC Archive Technician started work; advertisement for second Archive Tech posted
JAO support
NA CSV Liaison K. Sheth continued tours at OSF
Co-authored and helped implement a CSV procedures/logistics plan
Investigated PM03 pointing
OT Designing / testing of scheduling blocks for astro-holography
Prepared presentation for and participated in AOPvE presentation for ALMA Directors Council Feb3-4
Attended AOPvE-WG-f2f-II in Santiago Feb 10-12
Provided casa simdata script to run through ALMA configurations, to evaluate AOPvE scenarios
Attended SciOpsIPT f2f in Santiago Feb 12
Participated in biweekly telcons for OT, Ph1M, PT, AOPvE, SciOpsIPT
Software Development & testing
Participated in OT testing
Deployed new NRAO helpdesk, including categories for ALMA and CASA; began helpdesk management with lessons-learned being applied to ALMA helpdesk solution
Continued CASA development, including significant improvements to the viewer (overplotting spectra, importing masks w/ channel and Stokes, task/tool levels regularized, etc.), plotms (velocity axes, scalar averaging, selectable multi-colors, etc.), and single-dish tasks
Continued CASA testing and setting development priorities, including discussions on polarization calibration and testing of CARMA filler and mosaicking
Worked on VLA, ATCA, and CARMA pathways through CASA
Continued work with UVa High performance computing collaboration to investigate CASA code optimization and parallelization
Updated casaguides wiki for release 3.0; tested casaguides script extractor
Placed order for four NGAS systems for NA ARC Mirror archive; began preparation of archive room
Generated 2 "offline" versions of splatalogue for use with CASA and the OT
Conferences and workshops
Worked on defining theme for next NAASC science workshop to be held Jan. 2011 in Victoria, BC
Submitted final proposal description, speaker list, and abstracts for "Preparing for ALMA" Special Session at next American Astronomical Society meeting (24 May 2010, Miami FL)
Updated 2010 American Astronomical Society meeting exhibition video for display at NSF/AST offices (Arlington, VA) and at AUI Board reception (Washington DC)
Attended the conference: "The high redshift Universe, a multiwavelength view" in Aspen, CO presenting poster on high-z science with ALMA
Gave colloquium at Boston University including ALMA status
Gave colloquium and "Getting Ready for ALMA" seminar at Univ. Kentucky, & distributed copies of the "ALMA Primer"
Gave science talk for AUI Board Meeting, including ALMA
Gave 5 talks at JAO, including one on professional development and career issues
Other
Preparation of NAASC funding proposal to NSF; presented draft to AUI Board
Participated in US Decadal Survey
Updated memo outlining science requirements for a future Band 7 quarter waveplate.
Continued work on ALMA "Virtual Site Tour" website