Agenda

Minutes in bold.

CASA/JIVE VLBI Coordination Meeting

Attendance: George, Mark, Des, Ilse, Ryan, Neal, Justin

2021 Apr 28 @ 1400UTC

Logistics

  • Future Meeting dates (usually last Wed of the month):
    • 2021 Jun 2 @ 1400 UTC (one week late)
    • 2021 Jul 7?

General Admin

  • General Status w.r.t. Coronavirus measures
    • NRAO/ALMA:
      • NRAO in North America to continue work@home until ~September. Infections rates ~level (increases in some places). Recent flare-up in Socorro...
      • ALMA has started science observing "Initial + Basic Science Operations Phase"
    • ASTRON/JIVE
      • Science/computing staff continuing work-at-home for now
  • CASA Release Schedule
    • CASA 5.8/6.2: Development finished. Validation nearly done. Branch imminent.... (Possibly today, or Monday)
    • CASA 6.3: "Bug-fix" release ~June-ish?
      • NB: no 5.9!
      • OSX 10.14, 10.15 (11=Big Sur unlikely)
        • Ilse: lag for OSX growing.....; library mismatches; users stuck on casa 5.x?
        • Mark: need to get casa 6 working!
        • Ryan: will generate a table of status/plans of various OS version conditions
    • CASA 6.2.1: ALMA-specific (PL) bug-fixes ~August
    • CASA 6.4: End of year?
      • OSX 10.15, 11 (CAS-13405)
  • Requirements collation: 2020 May 07 document / VLBA Costing/Prioritization (2020 May 21)
    • Mark: After 5.8/6.2 branch/release, need to update with completed items (to appendix), and circulate/publicize
  • (Ryan) CNGI/ngCASA Status:
    • Demo 'release' of prototype package imminent, including basic imaging, flagging, and self-cal (George) functions
      • Exposing principal data structures and technology for key operations; for technically-oriented observers, not science-ready
      • (Mark) Intends to look at VLBI datasets via converter
    • FYI: CNGI Development instructions
  • 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
    • ?
  • VLBI Integration Branch: CAS-13295
  • Other admin?
    • Mark, Des, and Ilse added to casa-staff. (Yes, there is a digest mode.)
      • Shall we also make use of the CASA group's gsuite chat? (Requires a google account.) For now, no. (Could use mattermost, slack)
    • (Mark) DysCo storage manager to casacore prospects? Have asked Ville about sharable library. Will ask Offringa about casacore...
    • Justin: anything to report on instrument-specific end-to-end tests? Not yet, working on a script (working through some issues, e.g. rflag)

Development

  • CASA 5.8/6.2:
    • JIRA (VLBI) Status
    • (Des) CASA Fringefit Memo (draft available)
    • (Mark, CAS-12989) e-Merlin cross-hand swap (already fixed in casacore) (added new ver test from data provided by Anita; merged)
  • CASA 6.3+6.4 prioritization complete
    • (Justin) Anything to report?
  • Ongoing maintenance/development CASA 6.3/6.4 JIRA (VLBI) Status
    • Nearly ready for validation/merge-to-master for 6.3 (waiting for 5.8/6.2 branching)
      • (Mark, CAS-13270) Handle NaNs in imported Tsys. (ver test data added to casatestdata)
      • (Des, CAS-13224?) memory management improvements in fringefit. (already essentially validated by Janssen)
      • (Mark, CAS-8550) Pulsar-binned and single-IF import now not blocked by sys power support in exportuvfits; Need to coordinate casacore merge after 5.8/6.2 branching (pending CAS-11860?). (Need to push the casacore uprev. Has ver test.)
      • (Mark, CAS-13383) Mixed polarization basis conversion for JIVE (via generic freq-dep fully-general Jones matrix (JJones), enabled within basic calibration framework, with caltable generated externally by cb.createcaltable) (applycal test available for verification?) (George to review/bless)
      • Need to push these to/thru verification, to be poised for validation and merge (George to liase with Jen on validation)
    • Ongoing for 6.3+6.4
      • (George, CAS-12735; 12765,12553; 12954,10276) Frequency meta-info (work continues...)
      • (Mark, CAS-13287) AveragingTvi2preavg opt-out for fringefit (Available on integration branch; probably ready for trunk.)
      • (Mark, CAS-13266) Per-scan interpolation via overloading per-obs mechanism.
        • Cal Library case now supported. Need decision on syntax ("self"?)
      • (Des, CAS-13056) Overlapping solution intervals Initial implementation awaiting review by George
      • (Neal, CAS-13005) Handle refant exhaustion better
    • Underway for 6.3+6.4
      • (Des, CAS-13361) Polarization combination for fringefit. (deploy for fringefit 6.3, other things for 6.4?) (George to review)
      • (Mark, CAS-13003). EOP update (6.4). (See previous minutes for some details.)
    • Other/Miscellaneous
      • (Mark/Des) Using external storage managers (DysCo) with CASA 6. (Offringa). Prospects for adding to casacore?
      • CAS-12485: OTF weight munging for solve (Can we complete validation and deploy? Des seeking interested users at JIVE)
      • (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

-- GeorgeMoellenbrock - 2021-04-28
Topic revision: r1 - 2021-04-28, GeorgeMoellenbrock
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