Agenda

CASA/JIVE VLBI Coordination Meeting

2021 Jan 20 @ 1500UTC

Logistics

• Future Meeting dates (usually last Wed of the month):
  
  • 2021 Feb 24 @ 1500 UTC
    
  • 2021 Mar 31?

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 high, but stabilizing(?) in US; vaccinations have started.
    • ALMA progressing with array restart plans; first test observation last week?
  • ASTRON/JIVE
    • Science/computing staff continuing work-at-home for now
• CASA Release Schedule
  • CASA 6.1.1 for ALMA PL being exercised; working on a subtle repeatability issue (CAS-13283)
  • CASA 6.1.2/5.7.2 w/ polcal and tec fixes (VLASS, ALMA) released 2020Dec17.
  • CASA 5.8/6.2: Development wrapping up.
    
    • Except for a few critical blocker tickets, everything should be through verification/validation by end of January. Release by end of February.
    • VLBI-specific tickets reviewed below...
• Requirements collation: 2020 May 07 document / VLBA Costing/Prioritization (2020 May 21)
  
  • (Justin) CASA 5.9/6.3 Stakeholder requirements submitted 2020 Jan 8
• (Ryan) CNGI/ngCASA Status:
  • Anything to report?
    • Working toward demo 'release' in March; RCI Cal talk a few weeks ago encouraging
  • 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
    • Need github ids to provide edit permissions. Mark to gather/provide to Bjorn.
  • 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 gave great CASA/VLBI talk at Radio Camera Initiative Seminar Dec 11. (awkward histories well-navigated, good lessons for future)
  • link to RCI seminars: https://www.radiocamera.io/seminars
• Other admin?
  • (Mark/Des) Created new "VLBI integration" branch: CAS-13295. For EHT processing (Janssen), including some ongoing work (per-scan, accor, mem management, etc.)
  • Michael Janssen successfully defended his thesis last week, w/ CASA VLBI stuff very prominent. Now in postoc in Bonn.

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....
    • (Des) CAS-12765 (wide-spaced spws): waiting for freq meta fix in CAS-12735
    • (Neal) CAS-13184: accor corrdepflags.
      • Validation (Janssen) complete
      • some final tweaks to accor.xml? Mark thinks this should be ok.
      • PR for this and CAS-12736 to be coordinated by Neal this week.
    • (Mark) CAS-8537: gain curve.
      
      • Validation complete (Mark)
      • Some final tweaks to align tests in casa5 and casa6?
      • Neal will re-verify casa5/casa6 and tidy up, if necessary.
    • (Neal) CAS-12736 (revised accor test)
      • Merge pending? Yes.
      • PR for this and CAS-13184 to be coordinated by Neal this week.
    • (Mark) CAS-12989 (eMerlin crosshands) Validation complete (Anita Richards). Need hard-to-get eMerlin dataset for proper verification test....
      
      • look into recharacterizing this to avoid release confusion
    • (Pam Harris) CAS-11318: Fringe-fitting solution plotting has been implemented in plotms!
      • Actually, dispersive term still needed to be added...
      • Pam and Des seem to have converged? Probably should remove TEC option for ff table (George to endorse). Des to test latest packages. We will provide one last ask to Pam.
    • (CAS-13056, CAS-13003, and possibly CAS-13005 to slip to next cycle)
• CASA 6.3 prioritization
  • (Justin) CASA 5.9/6.3 Stakeholder requirements submitted 2020 Jan 8. Stakeholder meeting pending.
• Other development topics
  
  • (Des) Memory leak in fringe-fitter? (from big EHT case by Janssen). Apparently not a leak, just a large memory case.
    • Des has introduced some memory management improvements
  • (Mark) AveragingTvi2 and FringeFitting 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.
  • (Des) NaNs in imported Tsys. CAS-13270. (easy fix; *defer to 5.9/6.3)
  • (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
    • been looking at it, how about as a caltable? probably not, better to munge with standalone task. Also need to solve for scale factors needed to convert, though.
  • (George/Justin) to coordinate initial testing on CASR-463 (TEC) to better characterize basic requirements (also CAS-13040 re TEC retrieval changes)

AOB

• (Justin) Adding user-defined intents... Pushback from PL about permitting this for users. Really?!