Agenda

CASA/JIVE VLBI Coordination Meeting

2021 Feb 24 @ 1500UTC

Logistics

• Future Meeting dates (usually last Wed of the month):
  
  • 2021 Mar 31 @ 1400 UTC
    
  • 2021 Apr 28?

General Admin

• General Status w.r.t. Coronavirus measures
  • NRAO/ALMA:
    
    • NRAO in North America continues work@home for foreseeable future. Infections rates declining, vaccinations ramping up.
    • ALMA progressing with array restart plans; 10+ antennas science ~ready as of Feb 11; decisions expected ~this week on starting "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 wrapping up. VLBI-specific tickets reviewed below...
  • CASA 5.9/6.3: "Bug-fix" release ~June?
  • CASA 6.2.1: ALMA-specific (PL) bug-fixes ~September
  • CASA 6.4: End of year?
• Requirements collation: 2020 May 07 document / VLBA Costing/Prioritization (2020 May 21)
  
  • CASA 5.9/6.3 (and 6.2.1) Planning underway
    
• (Ryan) CNGI/ngCASA Status:
  • Working toward demo 'release' in March
    
  • FYI: CNGI Development instructions
  • (Mark) EHT SDC working group is interested in hearing about ngCASA (next meeting Jan 28 1400 UT)
    • ~15min summary from a ngCASA teammember? RR or JW? (George to ask JW... DONE 2021/01/20)
• Admin issues
  • CASA Docs now hosted on readthedocs platform: https://github.com/casangi/casadocs
    • Edit permissions for JIVE provided by Bjorn/Ryan
      
  • 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
  
  • Ilse has submitted URSI GASS (J11) abstract?
  • CASA Internal Virtual F2F meeting Feb 1-5
  • Jan-Willem gave great summary of CNGI/ngCASA to EHT SDC group Feb 11. Well-received, some followup expected...
  • RCI seminars: https://www.radiocamera.io/seminars. (Current series wrapped up 19 Feb, but slides/video for many talks are available.)
• VLBI Integration Branch: CAS-13295
• 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)
      • Progress continues, but now deferred to 6.3....
    • (Des) CAS-12765 (wide-spaced spws): waiting for freq meta fix in CAS-12735
    • (Neal) CAS-13184: accor corrdepflags. DONE.
    • (Mark) CAS-8537: gain curve. DONE.
    • (Neal) CAS-12736 (revised accor test). DONE.
    • (Mark) CAS-12989 (eMerlin crosshands) Validation complete (Anita Richards). Need hard-to-get eMerlin dataset for proper verification test....
      
    • (Pam Harris) CAS-11318: Fringe-fitting solution plotting has been implemented in plotms! DONE.
    • (CAS-13056, CAS-13003, and possibly CAS-13005 to slip to next cycle)
• CASA 6.3 prioritization underway
  
  • (Justin) Anything to report?
• Other development topics
  
  • (Des) Memory leak in fringe-fitter? (from big EHT case by Janssen). Apparently not a leak, just a large memory case. (JIRA ticket?)
    
    • Des has introduced some memory management improvements
      
  • (Mark) AveragingTvi2 and fringe fitting CAS-13287
    • Meta-data problems when preavg < solint? nRows(!) in VB2 is wrong when baseline (antenna) population varies within solint
    • Difficult to debug... Makes sense to bypass preavg....this nominal fix in integration branch.
  • (Mark) NaNs in imported Tsys. CAS-13270. (defer to 5.9/6.3)
  • (Des) Polarization combination in fringe fitting?
  • (Justin) f.d. scaling difference with AIPS? Lucas Hunt at USNO. acscl (avoid edge channels in accor)?
  • 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-8550). will be merged via gaincurve casacore changes;
    • Probably defer... also includes fix for "single-IF" fitsidi.... waiting for unrelated casacore validation in casa (SYSPOWER UVFITS export).
  • (Mark) Generalized polarization basis conversion (JIRA ticket?)
    
    • Implementing now through a Generic frequency-dependent Jones matrix
  • (George/Justin) to coordinate initial testing on CASR-463 (TEC) to better characterize basic requirements (also CAS-13040 re TEC retrieval changes)
  • (Justin) User-defined intents... pushback from PL? Not really; probably just due diligence polling stakeholders.

AOB

• ?