Agenda

CASA/JIVE VLBI Coordination Meeting

2020 June 24 @ 1400UTC

Logistics

• Future Meeting dates (usually last Wed of the month):
  
  • Nominally: 2020 Aug 12 @ 1400 UTC (dodging summer vacations)
    
  • (2020 Aug 26 @ 1400 UTC, TBD wrt vacations...)

General Admin

• General Status w.r.t. Coronavirus measures
  • NRAO/ALMA:
    
    • NRAO in North America now in Phase 1 of "Return to Full Operations" from June 8,
      • Ramping up on-site work, with strict protocols for site/lab/office safety
      • Science/computing staff settling in to work-from-home for the longer haul (considering internet bandwidth improvement options in Socorro)
      • VLA reconfigured to B-array, WIDAR correlator power infrastructure work completed, observations beginning soon....
      • RTFO Phase 2: Sep 5 - Dec 31, "Steady-state" in "New Normal", maybe some travel, F2F meetings; consider 2021+ according to conditions
    • ALMA (and Chile, in general) a few months behind North America, science operations unlikely to resume before ~Dec 2020.
  • ASTRON/JIVE
    • Science/computing staff continuing work-at-home for now?
• CASA Release Schedule
  • CASA 5.7/6.1: Almost ready to branch...
  • CASA 5.8/6.2: Planning complete.
• (Mark) Requirements collation status?
  • Document (2020 May 07) in good shape: pdf
  • Plans for broader circulation, additional edits? (TBD)
  • Coordination with costing spreadsheet? (Maybe some renumbering)
• (George) CASA VLBI Readiness
  • NRAO Users Committee: "VLBI support in CASA needs a higher priority to improve the health of the VLBA user community."
  • Tony Beasley seeking resources to support this.
• (Ryan) CNGI Status
  • CNGI/ngCASA Conceptual Design Review: 2020 Jun 9-10 confluence page
    • CoDR "suspended" due to review scoping issues, mismatch with ngVLA project methodology
  • Will proceed with some more prototyping over the next few months, culminating in a "demonstration release" for community later in the year
  • FYI: CNGI Development instructions
• Pending admin issues
  
  • DIY casa5 tarball build instructions can be found here
    • (Des having some issues sharing his tarball with others; following up with Ville....)
  • casa6 build issues: formal instructions for plotms, CASAshell, casa5/6 co-exist, c++ unit tests in casa6
• Upcoming meetings/workshops of relevance
  • Virtual NRAO Synthesis Imaging Workshop: Q&A Sessions: June 29 - July 17. George: "Calibration Q&A" on June 29.
  • JIVE VLBI Workshop 2020 Nov 2-6. Virtual, hopefully with an in-person component.
    • Maybe only in-person (off-site), due to internet bandwidth concerns
  • VLBI-specific sessions at European Astronomical Society Meeting on 2020 June 29: Session SS16
• Other admin?

Development

• CASA 5.7/6.1: VLBI contribution complete
  
  • JIRA Status
  • (Des) Critical fringefit bug? CAS-13094, will be merged with master for 5.7/6.1 ASAP, pending final testing (pending fix to Des' tarball issues)
• Processes
  
  • All VLBI-specific efforts to be documented with CASA effort; isolated via "VLBI@NRAO" and "VLBI@JIVE" JIRA labels.
  • Use "Release Notes" field to indicate current issues/status (appears in tables)
  • Use "Developer" field to indicate responsible developer(s), independent of assignee
• CASA 5.8/6.2:
  
  • JIRA Status
    • CAS-12736: accor test needs some VLBA data for proper test
      • 43 GHz dataset likely best-demonstrator; may be possible to re-use something from fringefit testing (Justin?)
    • CAS-8537: gain curve:
      • Mark has working implementation
      • Do we need a (wider) review of the proposed GAINCURVE subtable? Add OBSERVATION_ID to table?
      • Caltables use 16 parameters (8 per-pol), so a polynomial of degree 7.
      • How to integrate into gencal? (TBD for George: add new gencal mode, or make existing one smart enough?)
    • Other:
      • George to study what is needed in plotms for fringefit (CASR-537; may not require significant effort from Pam)
      • George/Justin to coordinate initial testing on CASR-463 (TEC) to better characterize basic requirements (also CAS-13040 re TEC retrieval changes)

AOB?

• N/A