Agenda

CASA/JIVE VLBI Coordination Meeting

2020 Oct 28 @ 1400UTC

Logistics

• Future Meeting dates (usually last Wed of the month):
  
  • 2020 Dec 9 @ 1500 UTC (avoiding Thanksgiving in US, anticipating no late Dec meeting)
  • 2021 Jan 20? (a week earlier than nominal)

General Admin

• General Status w.r.t. Coronavirus measures
  • NRAO/ALMA:
    
    • NRAO in North America will continue to work@home for foreseeable future (well into 2021). Infections rates increasing across US; NM now worse than ever...
    • ALMA developing array restart plans, expected to take many months. Resume science observing in March 2021?
  • ASTRON/JIVE
    • Science/computing staff continuing work-at-home for now
• CASA Release Schedule
  • CASA 5.7/6.1: Has been released (2020 Aug 20). Patch releases pending:
    
    • CASA 6.1.1 for ALMA PL being exercised; working on a repeatability issue
    • CASA 6.1.2(/5.7.x?) w/ polcal and tec fixes (VLASS, ALMA) pending. 6.1.1 vs. 6.1.2 discrepancy (probably same as above?)
  • CASA 5.8/6.2: Development ongoing.
    • Should be wrapping up development ~now
    • Tickets reviewed below...
• Requirements collation: 2020 May 07 document / VLBA Costing/Prioritization (2020 May 21)
  
  • (George) TBD: Complete re-numbering to better align with prioritization exercise from May 2020 (Some urgency, so we can share and update)
  • (George, Justin) TBD: Need to forward Requirements Doc and prioritization to Jen Donovan-Meyer, as input to Stakeholder process for CASA 5.9/6.3
  • (Justin) "VLBA 5-year Plan for CASA" (There is also a "VLA CASA 5-year plan" materializing, via Josh Marvil)
    • (George) This is great, as it enables CASA to be more proactive / less reactive as upstream developments materialize. CASA will mainly rely on instrument staff for (at least) initial impression of what has implications for downstream processing, but fantastic to be part of ~early conversations and evaluation. This is long overdue, IMO.
      
    • (Justin) Short instrument talks in Nov 18 stakeholder meetings, some technical detail included
  • (Mark) "Science roadmap for EVN"
  • Need new inputs to appear and stay consistent in our req docs
• (Ryan) CNGI/ngCASA Status:
  • Anything to report?
    • (Ryan) Mtg w/ Beasley: full speed ahead!
  • FYI: CNGI Development instructions
• Pending admin issues
  
  • DIY casa5 tarball build instructions can be found here
  • casa6 build issues: formal instructions for plotms, CASAshell, casa5/6 co-exist, c++ unit tests in casa6
• Meetings/workshops of relevance
  • CASA User Committee: 2020 Oct 20-23 (virtual)
    • Committee encouraged by VLBI efforts, including commitment by NRAO to seek additional development funding for VLBA. Need fringefit soln plotting for CASA6!
    • Ilse's main comments:
      • Release schedule/management much improved
      • Fringe-fit solution plotting!
      • VLBA dev support ambitions appreciated (will need to evolve balance of work with JIVE)
      • Impressed with ngCASA efforts (NRAO-centric at the moment, how to expand?)
      • Doc changes good
    • Ryan?
      • ngCASA: International collab == endless debate? No, just need to be decisive. Once main infrastructural decisions made, tent will expand...
        
      • WCS replacement complicated, will likely involve collaboration
    • Aggregate cal plotting... (Bietenholz)
      • OTF aggregation desirable for performance, could feed plotting.... (though cal type specificity and time vs. freq dependence interesting)
  • JIVE VLBI Workshop 2020 Nov 2-6. (virtual)
    • Next week! Attendance capped at 200!
    • Collaborate with NRAO/VLBA in future workshops? Maintain communication on this...
    • Over coming months/year, Justin to work on VLBA tutorials based on recent JIVE efforts, anticipating CASA/VLBA tutorials at next NRAO Synthesis Summer school (2022)
• Other admin?

Development

• CASA 5.8/6.2:
  
  • JIRA (VLBI) Status
    • Notables:
    • (George) CAS-12735: Frequency meta-info (includes generalized fix for CAS-12553, and several other bug tickets)
      • Making progress, been distracted by 6.1.1/6.1.2 in recent weeks. Committed to completing it!
    • (Des) CAS-12765 (wide-spaced spws): waiting for freq meta fix in CAS-12735
    • (Mark) CAS-13184): accor corrdepflags. Ready for verification w/ Neal
    • (Mark) CAS-8537: gain curve. Now in validation. Need to ping Jen.
      
      • (Mark) Test of gaincurve to use small dataset recently obtained by Justin: TL015
      • (Mark) TL015 revealed some importfitsidi bugs... (single-IF scalar vs. multi-IF array columns)
    • (George, Mark?) CAS-12736 (revised accor test) Mark may be able to help with test deployment (cf gaincurve above)
      • George remains curious about OSX version discrepancies
    • (Mark) CAS-12989 (eMerlin crosshands) Validation complete (Anita Richards)? Yes. Need hard-to-get eMerlin dataset for proper verification test....
      
    • (CAS-13056, CAS-13003, and possibly CAS-13005 to slip to next cycle)
• Other development
  • Intents for VLBI?
    • depends on upstream supplying this info (future VEX to support)... for now, tool to munge in the MS would be nice...
  • CAS-12485: OTF weight munging for solve (Can we complete validation and deploy? Des seeking interested users at JIVE)
  • (Mark) VLBA pulsar binned data.... requires casacore fix to importfitsidi (PR pending, CAS- ticket pending)
  • (Mark) Generalized polarization basis conversion
  • 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