Thursday Morning Meeting - 19 October 2017

  • DIAL-IN NUMBERS & PASSCODES:
  • IP: 192.33.117.12##8110
  • Phone: (434) 817-6524

Attendance

  • Socorro:
  • CV:
  • Garching:
  • SCO:

News / Meetings / Visitors

Build, Release

  • Any reason to keep these in /home/casa/packages anymore?: casa-release-5.1.0-68, casa-release-5.1.0-69, casa-release-5.1.0-71, casa-release-5.1.0-73, casa-release-5.1.1-4

Verification Testing

  • Failing Pipeline test is working - Brian provided a fix
  • Merging regression and unit tests scripts
    • A bug in Nose is causing the -all (CAS-10844) option to not work
      • Actively working on this issue now
    • Converted unit test list .txt file to a json file
    • For runUnitTest.py
      • --all is not working
      • Let the test team know if you find any non-working options in this file
  • Iterating with NAOJ on running test suite 3 locally in Japan
  • Build/test hardware for FY 2018
    • Macs: We have requested 1 MacMini, 1 MacPro (along with a 10 TB RAID6 HDD), and an additional 10 TB RAID6 HDD for the existing MacPro
      • Purchase request has been made for the Mini, hopefully we will have it in place by the end of the month (for 10.13 build/test development)
      • The Pro and HDD will be ordered in the next week or so, to have it here by December
      • The second external HDD will be ordered soon after that, to receive it by January 2018
      • We believe this is all we need for new OSX platform hardware for 2018
    • Linux
      • There needs to be further discussion on how to make the Linux build and test hardware more uniform and flexible
      • Currently not a crisis on the Linux platform, but should be sorted out and implemented in the medium term (ideally ~6 months)

Validation Testing

  • Current validation tally
    • 122 Under Validation, 87 Ready to Validate.
    • 2 tickets went RtV this week so far. 2 tickets went through Validation to Resolved this week so far.
    • Oct 6 - 12: 12 tickets assigned for validation. 8 tickets resolved.
  • Build and packaging of 5.1.1 (needs to be kicked off imminently)?
  • Discussion item: Andy -- update on running PL runs regularly during the build + test stage with each build to catch problems earlier?
  • JDM back in the office as of this afternoon
  • Current Testing Efforts for 5.2 deliverables
  • Current Testing Efforts for 5.3 deliverables
    • imaging issues/autoboxing refinements
    • statwt2 (CAS-10530)
    • systematic tests of mstransform
    • plone/CASAdocs
    • further parallelization testing (non-ALMA pipeline specific)
    • polarization calibration
    • testing snapshot -- please see https://safe.nrao.edu/wiki/bin/view/Software/CASAUserTesting for the up-to-date list of tickets and testing status
      • testing ongoing:
        • plotants tickets (Pam, few more)
        • plotms/plotbandpass capability (Pam, CAS-9053)
        • imhistory tickets (Dave, several)
        • phase center shift in plotms (CAS-8431)
        • frequency interpolation of 'linearflag' for BP tables with good solutions (George, CAS-10772)
        • ms tool selectinit (Pam, Sandra, CAS-10818)
        • immath poli/pola testing (Dave, two tickets)
        • simulations (Remy, several)
        • moving ALMA pipeline's findcontinuum method into C++. (Dave, CAS-10521)
        • imfit result in pixel coordinates (Dave, Dirk, CAS-10696)
        • plotms shows solutions of all antennas when plotting the reference antenna in a gaincal table (Pam, CAS-7049)
        • ImageCollapser::collapse() should by optimized for degenerate axes (Dave, CAS-9005)
      • "next up":
        • CAS-9538 Perley & Butler 2017 flux density scale, tester identified
        • CAS-8270 Implement remaining plotcal functionality in plotms, tester identified
        • CAS-10329 rename plot ms tool from 'plotms' to 'pmtool'
        • CAS-10366 Implement ACCOR equivalent, George: help?

Architecture

HPC

  • 5.2 Testing
    • CAS-10834: In flagdata, mode = summary behavior different between serial and parallel runs
      • Closed: not a bug. The casalog showed the flag summary of one of the MPIServers, not the consolidated total.
    • CAS-10794: Slowdown of pipeline tasks in parallel mode
      • Chat with Ger....... He suggests looking into differences in tiling parameters.
        • There seem to be big differences in tile shapes and other parameters between standard / concatenated images ( CAS-10796).
        • But there doesn't seem to be any differences between single MSs (serial) and Multi-MSs (parallel) for which we also see severe performance issues, for example in MS selection ( CAS-10837).
  • Testing analysis
    • We started to re-run some of the E2E5 datasets with different number of cores to understand:
      • how they affect the speedup of pre-imaging tasks and tclean. Task tclean tends to scale well with the number of cores (as seen in past tests and benchmarks). Other tasks such as flagdata, applycal and split do not scale as well with N_cores, therefore it is wise to think that the choice of N_cores for flagdata+others is different than that given to tclean.
    • Verify in the existing datasets how the processing time of tclean varies with different parameters such as: specmode, gridder, imsize, nchan, deconvolver

Development

  • CASA 5.2
    • Crystal created CAS-10838 and set it to 5.2 release, but this should be moved to 5.3. The new feature is unrelated to the pipeline or parallelisation. It is to expose the hidden parameter "reindex" in mstransform so that manual ALMA processing looks like pipeline products.
    • I would like this ticket to be accepted in the CASA context first, because it means people will start creating MSs without any reindexing. I don't know what will happen if they try to mix reindexed and non-reindexed MSs, for example in imaging!
    • Performance with reference-concat images + slowness of 'concat' itself
    • tclean speedup variation analysis (covered in HPC section)
  • CASA 5.3
    • Model writes for parallel run
    • statwt2 incremental requirements

Pipeline

  • CASA 5.1.1-3 / Pipeline
    • Morgan gave go ahead on Friday, sanity checks pass, acceptance ?
  • CASA 5.2 / Pipeline
    • What to do about virtually concatenated images
  • CASA 5.3 / Pipeline
    • Temporary issue with ms.selectinit
    • Warning issued to pipeline group concerning behavior change of ms.nrows
  • non HPC pipeline efficiency issues
    • use of imhead task rather than ia tool in findContuum.py module, Todd to investigate
    • too many ms.open calls in hif_makeimlist (?), under investigation
  • ALMA backwards compatibility issues iin hifa_restoredata
  • ICT leads meeting
    • pipeline presentation (Lindsey)
    • OODT pipeline workflow presentation (Morgan / Raphael)
    • BDF (re)format discussions

AOB

Developer Reports

Thursday Meeting
  • Sanjay Bhatnagar
  • Sandra Castro
    • Verified that CAS-10730 is fixed
    • Reported that the change in behaviour of ms.nrow() broke the ALMA pipeline in 5.3.0-prerelease. Now it seems that setjy also needs to be updated with the new ms.nrow(). (pford: setjy fixed, ready to re-test with new tarballs in CAS-10818)
    • Discussions with Kana on the parallelisation of the SD pipeline
  • Lindsey Davis
    • attended ICT leads meeting October 16-18, presented update on the pipeline
    • further discussion with Remy and others on restore data backwards compatibility issues
    • followup with Remy and Dirk on some non-HPC pipeline efficiency issues
    • organized pipeline display code refactoring effort
    • performed sanity check on the 5.1.1-3 prerelease tarball
  • Bjorn Emonts
  • Pam Ford
    • CAS-10818 (ms tool changes to selectinit and nrow) - fixed selectinit, fixed setjy nrow call, sent email to group about change in nrow
    • CAS-10822 (plotms spawns new windows) - in progress, forks new process when dbus (or connection to it) fails
    • CAS-9053 (atm/tsky overlays) - committed changes in response to validation testing report
    • Hosted candidate for CARTA position
  • Enrique Garcia
  • Bob Garwood
    • CAS-10732/CAS-10695 : both tickets for investigating filler speed (asdm2MS, bdflags2MS). Mostly just getting my bearings on how best to profile these things. Also, every time I look into this code I have a wtf distraction that I end up following that distracts from why I was there in the first place.
    • Moving my ALMA ASDM workspace over to git.
    • Some gbtidl work for GBO - mostly driven by the unexpected move of the IDL installation here in CV which broke several things (a few things are still broken).
  • Kumar Golap
  • David Mehringer
  • George Moellenbrock
    • Some followup on CASA-VLBI meeting
    • Prep for QUESO talk next week
  • Dirk Petry
  • Martin Pokorny
  • Federico M Pouzols
    • Away at ASTRON this week for ERIS2017.
    • Trying to investigate various slowdown-in-parallel issues (tickets under CAS-10794).
    • Last 3 (longer) runs for E2E5 datasets ready this week. Weblogs will be transferred soon, just waiting for last serial run to finish.
  • Urvashi Rao
  • Darrell Schiebel
  • Ville Suoranta
  • Takahiro Tsutsumi
Friday NAOJ Meeting
  • Kanako Sugimoto
    • resumed work for sideband separartion algorithm ( CAS-8091)
    • investigated unexpected changes of pipeline results and found they come from change of ms.getdata. reported to casa-staff (and pipeline developers as heads-up).
  • Wataru Kawasaki
  • Takeshi Nakazato
  • Renaud Miel
    • CAS-8087 plotms pointings: specs discussion, code reading, new data for testing
-- MorganGriffith - 2017-10-11
Topic revision: r17 - 2017-10-19, RenaudMiel
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