Agenda

CASA/JIVE VLBI Coordination Meeting

2021 Mar 31 @ 1400UTC (NB: DST start March 14 & 28 in USA & Netherlands, respectively)

Logistics

• Future Meeting dates (usually last Wed of the month):
  
  • 2021 Apr 28 @ 1400 UTC
    
  • 2021 May 26?

General Admin

• General Status w.r.t. Coronavirus measures
  • NRAO/ALMA:
    
    • NRAO in North America continues work@home for foreseeable future. Infections rates leveling (increases in some places), vaccinations ramping up.
    • 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....
  • CASA 5.9/6.3: "Bug-fix" release ~June-ish?
  • 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:
  • Demo 'release' of prototype package in early April, including basic imaging, flagging, and self-cal (George) functions
    
  • 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
  
  • Ilse's URSI GASS (J11) abstract accepted (Rome, 28 Aug - 4 Sep)
  • Mark gave short talk at EAVN VLBI meeting (Thailand, building 40m dish that will also be used for VLBI), 2021 Mar 5
  • 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?
  
  • (George) Should casa-staff email list be expanded to include external groups (and thus shower them with all manner of daily trivia)? Or should there be a distinct email exploder expressly for important announcements relevant to the broader CASA contribution community?
  • Question from Bjorn: "Is fringefit still 'experimental' in CASA 6.2?"

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) 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 5.9/6.3+6.4 prioritization underway
  
  • (Justin) Anything to report?
    
    • (George) Several of the more interesting VLBA-specific feature requests (resolved polarization calibrators, VLBA pulse-cal, VLA SysPower for Tsys, TEC) may indeed be hard to schedule this year.
    • (Mark) Likely to support pulse-cal effort with ingestion definition and mechanics based on recent similar work for Tsys, gaincurve. NB: required algorithmic development will likely borrow heavily from the existing fringefit implementation, including an ambiguity-resoloving step using a fringefit solve on a short scan
    • (George) Scan intent-setting likely a good project for Neal
      
• Other maintenance/development JIRA
  
  • Nearly ready for validation/merge-to-master for 5.9/6.3 (waiting for 5.8/6.2 branching)
    • (Mark, CAS-13270) Handle NaNs in imported Tsys.
    • (Des, CAS-13224?) memory management improvements in fringefit
    • (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?)
    • (Mark, CAS-13383) Mixed polarization basis conversion for EHT (via generic freq-dep fully-general Jones matrix (JJones), enabled within basic calibration framework, with caltable generated externally
  • Ongoing for 5.9/6.3+6.4
    • (George, CAS-12735; 12765,12553; 12954,10276) Frequency meta-info
    • (Mark, CAS-13287) AveragingTvi2 preavg opt-out for fringefit
    • (Mark, CAS-13266) Per-scan interpolation via overloading per-obs mechanism
    • (Des, CAS-13056) Overlapping solution intervals (initial implementation awaiting review by George)
  • Underway for 5.9/6.3+6.4
    
    • (Des, CAS-13361) Polarization combination for fringefit
    • (Mark, CAS-13003). EOP update (6.4?)
  • Other/Miscellaneous
    
    • 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

• (Mark/Des) Using external storage managers (DysCo) with CASA 6